


Momentum

by heartofthesunrise



Series: Break the Sky 'Verse [1]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Setting, Alternate Universe - Space, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Major Character Injury, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Slow Burn, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-10 23:31:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11702139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: “We’re criminals because he pays us to be,” Brian said irritably, and Ray could hear the plastic clatter of the screen being set down too hard on the table. “Is it so much to ask for a little loyalty?”“Loyalty’s for the ones on the receiving end of the paychecks,” Bob said. He sounded tired, like it wasn’t the first time he and Brian had gone over this argument. “Luxury of the wealthy: loyalty’s given, not taken.”





	Momentum

**Author's Note:**

> It's finally here, lads... Big ups to [Prophetic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/prophetic) and [Trojie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/trojie) for insightful beta reading and patient hand-holding, respectively. Part Two is in motion but I'm a tragedy of a human. Proceed with caution.

“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.   
Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”  
\- Hanya Yanigahara,  _ A Little Life _ (2015)

  


The ship was just kissing atmo when something in the engine gave way with an ominous clunk. 

Ray loved liftoff best, the way they hurtled towards the blue, blue sky and then, abruptly, beyond it like passing through a curtain, the black cloth of space pooled around them, dimpled with stars. That was on a good day, of course – not today, when the blue was bucking and spinning around him as the ship’s gravity systems tried to right themselves, the scorched tan of the desert they’d just launched from looming up in front of the bridge. Ray gripped the yoke in both hands and wrenched it to the side, fighting gravity and a gunked-up fuel intake valve he hadn’t had the capital to get fixed. Either physics would swat them back down to the roasted ground on Sol Diablo, killing them instantly, or the engine would get its bearings in time and they’d be on their merry. It would’ve seemed very dramatic and adventurous if it didn’t happen at least once a month. 

“Frankie!” Ray yelled over the intercom. “Fix it!” 

A warble of static came back to him. He squeezed the throttle, like sheer force of will would jostle the engine back to rights. 

And then, suddenly, the ship righted itself and pushed back into the sky, the vault of blue stabilized around them. 

Ray picked up the com. “Thanks,” he said. 

Frank didn’t answer over the com, which was just as well – they could rarely understand each other over the static. Just one more thing on Ray’s endless list of expensive repairs to be made. Instead, after a few minutes Ray could hear the familiar sound of Frank’s gait, his boots trudging up the steps to the bridge.

“Y’know,” he said, hanging on the edge of the doorway and looking in, past Ray to the viewport where the sky was becoming translucent in front of them, “It’d save us all a lot of trouble if we just went down next time.” He was grinning, a big smear of grease on his neck and ear, like he’d been mucking around in the guts of the ship with his teeth instead of his hands.

“And miss this?” Ray asked. “We’ve got seven days in transit and then a two-day layover in the swankiest farm town this side of the system; we’re living the good life.”

“Shut up, Toro,” Frank said. He stepped forward to drum his fingers on the back of the empty navigator’s chair and grinned at Ray, cheeky. “You’re supposed to be steering. Don’t let my girl drift, now.”

Ray patted the control panel. “She knows what she’s doing.”

“Sure.” Frank rolled his eyes, then tacked on a sardonic,  _ "Captain." _

Ray put his feet up on the dash and watched the way the sky winked from emphatic, cloudless blue to black as they left atmo. It was true enough that the ship knew what she was doing – he’d plotted a route in her internal navigation system the night before, and even if she had the tendency to drift, he could let her go for a few hours without coming back to check their coordinates. But it was true, too, that old adage about takeoffs and landings. He’d take her solidly into the black and then see about something to eat and some time with the rest of his crew. In the interim he could stand a couple of hours alone with the quiet of the stars.

-

Ray didn’t even realize he’d been asleep until he was waking up. There’d been another hiccup in the engine as they were getting their bearings. They were passing the rim of a field of frost-coated debris, bits of an old ghost ship that Ray might’ve stopped to salvage if it was fresher, or he was younger, or their fuel allotment wasn’t as strict as it was this trip. He’d wanted to see them safely into the middle of nowhere, under the radar the way they liked to be, and it must’ve been around then that he’d shut his eyes for a minute, and then James was at his side shaking his shoulder loosely. 

“You missed dinner,” he said. James’s voice was raspy and gentle, that exact cadence only he had. “Thought maybe you were dead.”

“Don’t get all hopeful,” Ray murmured, rolling his shoulders back and turning his head to pop a stuck joint in his neck. “And don’t lecture me about missing dinner if you didn’t at least save me some.”

James looked genuinely hurt – or, he would’ve, if Ray didn’t know the way one corner of his mouth tugged and twitched trying to keep from smiling. “Who do you think I am?” he asked, and presented Ray with a covered plate.

It wasn’t much – they had protein and some canned things, government surplus mainly, but James was not untalented. There was a hunk of brown bread that looked like it’d been baked that day, and the protein had been diced and smothered in some sort of gravy. Ray could make out chunks of canned potato and corn, and even if their supplies were a bit past expiration, it tasted almost like a real meal. “Thanks,” he said sincerely.

“Don’t mention it. You stay fed, you heal faster, I do less work in the long run. It’s purely selfish, I swear.” They’d picked James up on Liberty a few years back, one of those nothing moons out at the edge of the system. He’d grown up there, and done his medical training there, and his family was all there, still. Ray would’ve wondered if he missed them, except he knew that he did. When he’d come aboard he was a small-town doctor looking to see something besides the desert he’d always known, and Ray had been a captain with a shorthanded crew and a penchant for getting shot at, and the rest, as they say, was history.

“Frankie work out that engine thing?” Ray asked around a mouthful of bread.

“You know he didn’t.”

Ray snorted. He’d asked as a matter of principle more than anything – they couldn’t do much about the intake valve but replace it, and hope this one lasted until they had the spare cash to make the trade. He shoveled a forkful of protein into his mouth and chewed. “We’re not keeping you busy enough, are we?”

James tilted his head amusedly to one side. “What?”

“I mean it’s been almost three months since anyone’s been roughed up, and you must be bored, because this is fucking delicious.”

James laughed and it crinkled his eyes. They all wore lines deeper on their faces since shipping out, like time worked differently out in the great nothingness of space. Ray swiped the hunk of bread through the gravy and tore a chunk off it with his teeth.

“You ever gonna leave that fancy navigation system to do its job and get some real sleep?” James asked.

“Can’t be fancy when it drifts the way it does,” Ray said. He ran a hand over the nav desk, which he’d salvaged from another ship a few years back. It looked entirely out of place on the bridge, in the same way that every scrapped and refurbished mechanism on the ship seemed cobbled together. In that way it was a perfect fit. He turned back to James. “But I’ll tear myself away if you miss me so bad.”

James lingered in the doorway while Ray re-checked their coordinates and they walked, shoulder to shoulder, down the corridor to the galley.

It was maybe Ray’s favorite part of the ship. The galley was an asymmetrical oblong of a room, with sloping walls covered in mismatched cabinets at odd angles. The center of the room was islanded by a broad wooden table. Bob had built it shortly after Ray’d hired him, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and while the surface was scuffed and marred by the occasional burn, it was as sturdy and stalwart as ever. Around it – still, presumably, in the places they’d occupied at dinner – was Ray’s crew:  Frank, a little less grease-stained than he’d been when Ray’d last seen him, his chin propped in the palm of one hand and his elbows up on the table, reading a book; Bob, reading over his shoulder, willfully ignoring the assortment of guns on the table that he was supposed to be servicing; Brian, his loyal first mate, hunched over a handheld screen going over the last hail they’d gotten from Aaronson.

Against the starboard wall was the kitchen, James’s domain, with the pans from dinner left to soak in the deep, utilitarian sink. Ray made his way over and started on the washing up without being asked, and when he looked around James was at the table with a big, goofy, fond smile on his face. Ray loved his crew.

“You’re gonna make yourself go blind watching that thing,” Ray told Brian.

Brian looked up. “He should’ve given us more information up front. I don’t know what he’s playing at, it’s not like he doesn’t know he can trust us.” He switched the screen off and fixed Ray with a penetrating look.

Because Ray was exactly himself, he turned back to the dishes and pretended Brian didn’t have a point.

“Y’know,” Frank said, setting down his book. “He  _ does  _ know we’re  _ criminals.  _ That’s not a bad reason not to trust somebody.”

“We’re criminals because he pays us to be,” Brian said irritably, and Ray could hear the plastic clatter of the screen being set down too hard on the table. “Is it so much to ask for a little loyalty?”

“Loyalty’s for the ones on the receiving end of the paychecks,” Bob said. He sounded tired, like it wasn’t the first time he and Brian had gone over this argument. “Luxury of the wealthy: loyalty’s given, not taken.”

Ray scrubbed the last crumbs out of a loaf pan and set it to dry on the sideboard. He loved his crew, but sometimes they thought more deeply than was healthy for them. When he turned around Brian was fiddling restlessly with the screen, not turning it on but turning it over and over in his hands.

“It rubs me the wrong way, is all,” Brian said. He looked sincerely up at Ray.

They hadn’t survived as many close shaves as they had by not trusting each other. Brian had been indirectly responsible for getting Ray his first job shipping out with a freight ship, and when Ray’d come into a vessel of his own, Brian had been nearly the only person willing to come aboard with him.

“Okay,” Ray said. “If it looks suspect we’ll try to figure something else out.”

Bob jerked his head up at the same time Frank exclaimed, “Like hell we will!”

“Frank -” Ray started.

“With all due respect, Captain, we’re trying to stay in the damn sky here,” Frank said. “I’m good but I’m no miracle worker, and that was more than a hiccup during takeoff.”  

“I’m just  _ saying,”  _ Ray insisted, and the problem with hiring your childhood friends is that they never quite took you seriously, even when they called you Captain. “We can keep our wits about us. There’ll be work for us at the Lighthouse, from Aaronson or from somebody else. Okay?”

Frank’s mouth tucked down at the corners, just a little, just for a moment, in the suggestion of a frown. Bob patted him clumsily on the back of the neck, though, and the moment was broken. Spats like this reminded Ray that they were more than his crew, that they were his family.

“Got any of that bread left over, Doc?” he asked James.

“In the pantry,” James said. He didn’t weigh in on family arguments as a matter of principle. “Easy does it, though - it’s a long flight to the Lighthouse and we’re low on flour.”

Another thing for Ray’s list. God, he hoped Aaronson was on the up-and-up about this job.

-

They stopped for two days on a nothing moon called Olympia, almost too small to speak of, where a bit of trade wasn’t unheard of. Like many of the moons on the rim it featured faulty terraforming, habitable and fertile land in only a few isolated areas, windswept desert across the rest. It was in one of these canyons that they set down, ready to rendezvous with their contact from their last job.

“You’d think we’d make more fencing government goods,” Frank said as he helped unload crates out of the cargo bay. “Y’know, what with the risk, and all.”

“Maybe we could,” Ray agreed. He hefted one crate up out of the crawlspace under the iron grille floor. “I feel a lot better, though, knowing this stuff’s going to people who could use it.”

“At a markup,” Brian said. He took the crate from Ray and settled it onto the dolly. Their buyers would be there soon.

“Hey,” Ray said. “They’re choosing not to deal with the government. I can respect that, but we’ve gotta eat, too.”

James was watching from the steps, sitting with his chin propped in both hands. “Captain, you ever think about robbing the man outright? Quit being the middleman guys like Aaronson are looking to cut out?”

“Aaronson wouldn’t do that to us,” Frank interjected.

“He might,” Brian said. “Don’t underestimate him. He’s a businessman.”

“Right,” Frank said. He sounded dejected. He was inarguably the optimist out of the lot of them when it came to the sort of work they did, and as such, the most easily discouraged when the more unsavory aspects of that work made themselves known. “Well, there’ll be folks that will be happy to see this protein, no matter the price.” He settled the last crate on the stack on the dolly.

A shrill alarm filled the cargo hold, alerting them to another ship’s proximity. “Probably Jepha,” Ray said. He confirmed on the com port and sent their coordinates.

The dropoff was easy - they’d worked with Jepha before. He came aboard with his familiar, pleasant smile and looked over the goods thoroughly, Ray at his shoulder, before handing Ray a fold of bills.

“These above board?” Ray asked, thumbing through the bills. “I have to ask.”

Jepha shrugged. “If they aren’t, they were given to me that way,” he said. “I’d love to pay you in coin but times aren’t what they used to be.”

It was a regular complaint. Ray counted out the bills again, then stuck them in the pocket of his trousers and shook Jepha by the hand.

“You need help with those?” he asked, and Jepha motioned for Bob and Brian to help him to his own ship with the crates. Jepha’s crew, though undeniably loyal, lacked the muscle of Ray’s.

A half hour later, they watched Jepha’s ship grow small against the pink and purple sky. The heat of the day had burned off, leaving the desert canyons cool and breezy. Ray sat on the threshold of the open airlock and watched the inky blue of true night fall into place beyond them.

James settled in next to him. They both watched a distant prickly pear cactus turn from a shape to a silhouette against the sandy, clay-streaked hills.

“You’re happy here, right?” Ray asked. Above them, the night sky was very blue.

“Actually I’m ready to get off-world when you’re done stargazing, sir,” James replied. He didn’t look it, though, with his face tipped up and the starlight painting a pale stripe along the center of his broad nose. It made clear the bow of his lips, the jut of his chin.

“You know what I mean,” Ray said patiently. One had to be patient with James.

“I know,” James agreed. He didn’t elaborate, and Ray didn’t press him. There was more than a whole world out there - a world of worlds, and James was an explorer at heart. He’d shipped out with Ray’s crew to see something of the great big sky, and Ray suspected their little slice of it - desert moons and plantation planets, the same smuggling route they’d been flying for years - wouldn’t tether him forever.

Ray had accepted long ago that if James wanted to leave, he wouldn’t stop him. There was a cluster of desert wildflowers near the foot of the open bay door, and Ray stared at them to avoid looking at James. They were so unlikely, growing there in the loose sand. What energy they must expend just to keep ahold of their roots.

Out over the rolling, unfathomable sand of the desert, the last vestiges of the violent sunset burned. James opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, did it anyway. How very like him. “I admire the way you live your life, sir,” he said. “I am proud to be on your crew.”

Ray snorted. When he looked over at James, James was looking back at him sincerely, but he was smiling his goofy smile, and he shut his eyes when he met Ray’s gaze.

“Doc, I didn’t know you cared,” Ray said sardonically. He reached over to do  _ something,  _ to slug James on the shoulder or pat him on the back, and was surprised to find his fingers folding around James’s hand instead.

“Well, don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll get a better offer someday,” James said, but he sounded pleased. He turned back out to face the sunset. “Just wanted to make sure you knew that day was still a ways off.”

The desert darkened. The iron-grey body of the ship reflected blue, blue, blue and glinted with starlight. Out there were dozens of moons, planets they may never touch, not together. Despite himself, Ray felt very lonely all of a sudden.

“Thanks,” he said. He held James’s hand a while longer.

They stayed overnight in the desert, and the next morning, when they were ready to take off for the station where Aaronson did business, James made them all powdered eggs with canned tomatoes and fresh bread, and they ate at the table together, like they rarely did. This was a life. A modest one, but the one all of them wanted.

-

There were always preparations to make before they met with Aaronson. He saw clients and employees both out of an orbiting satellite, way out on the rim, at the edge of where anyone might venture on business. He called it the Lighthouse. Ray thought that was, frankly, melodramatic as hell.

Brian prepped him with the job specs over and over. He kept Brian around to handle business, first and foremost, and because he was handy in a scuffle. They’d met years ago - strangers in a bar brawl who’d ended up on the same side - and they’d been friends, and business partners eventually, ever since.

“He didn’t mention a timeline, but if it’s a longer gig we’re gonna have to press him on the payment. We’re burning through fuel cells like crazy with this intake valve,” Brian insisted.

Ray knew that. Ray knew a lot more than Brian thought, most of the time, but he knew the meeting prep was as much to keep Brian calm as it was to brush Ray up on the finer points of negotiation. On the far end of the galley they kept a little couch, sunken down in the middle and well past its natural lifespan, and Frank was sprawled out on it with a book in his hands and his feet in Bob’s lap. He looked up and rolled his eyes at Ray.

Brian caught him. “Hey, this is important,” he said, before turning back to Ray and going over Aaronson’s message again. Ray let him tire himself out on it for another half hour before getting up mid-conversation and going to tend to the washing up.

Ray liked doing the dishes. He thrust both hands into the soapy water and drew out a plate, went at it with the sponge, lost himself to the motion. There was something domestic about it, some comfort to be found in scrubbing clean their plates from breakfast, the handfuls of cutlery sunk to the bottom of the sink. How there was, more often than not, a solitary teaspoon crusted with dried peanut butter from one of Frank’s late-night snacks as he checked the engine. Ray scrubbed it clean. Gross, maybe, but a rare constant in a life made up of guesswork and uncertainties.

He wouldn’t admit it to Frank or Bob, probably not even to James, who was hard to rattle, but Brian’s anxiety had him feeling a little nervous himself. They’d dealt with Aaronson dozens of times over the last few years, and while Brian was naturally antsy, prone to over-preparation and nerves, he was on another level this time around. They’d watched through the message enough times that Ray could remember it almost word for word.

_ Good morning, boys, hope you’re well. I’ve got work for you if you’re in the neighborhood or can get to the Lighthouse within the week. The pickup leg presents some… let’s not call them challenges, let’s call them  _ optimization points,  _ and I’m hoping not to hire an untested crew. See you soon. _

And that was it. It wasn’t, all things considered, so ominous, except for the fact that they  _ had _ worked with Aaronson before and he’d  _ never _ asked them in to work for him without giving them an estimated starting and ending date, and typically an amount of upfront pay. If Ray had gotten this wave from anyone he trusted less, he’d have dismissed it out of hand on those grounds alone.

But it was getting harder and harder to turn away work, when it came calling. This job for Jepha had been their first in weeks, and running government goods from the bigger planets out to the moons on the rim wasn’t exactly a goldmine. Everything they made they’d spend on fuel and food at the next opportunity, just to stay in the air and independent.

When Ray had started out hauling freight, work had seemed easy to come by; he’d paid off the money he’d borrowed to fix the ship up within his first year in the air, had registered her under the name  _ Jet Star _ and been able to expand the crew in his second. He’d sheepishly sent money back to Frank’s parents on Brunswick, who had more or less raised him out of the goodness of their hearts after his own parents had died. It had been only honest work then, supply runs from farmers to grocers, raw materials subsidized by the government that had to be taken to new settlements on moons where the terraforming was still patchy.

This planetary system had been tamed by and built on trust, on the notion that a fair and just society provides for its people. For a long time that had worked - after Earth had fallen, some two hundred years previously, the trauma of resettling had instilled within people a camaraderie, a willingness to support one another without expectation of repayment. It had carried on like that for decades and only in the last thirty years had that singularly earthly spirit, supply and demand, once more been resurrected. Work was more scarce now, and more dangerous, and if Ray’d had a home to return to he might not bother sailing at all.

And yet, he couldn’t imagine any other life. He turned from the sink, where the turbid dishwater was now circling the drain, and regarded his crew. His family. Frank had gone to check the engine and was only just wandering back in, streaked with grease, now settling in next to Bob on the uneven couch and giving him that smile that showed all his teeth, that meant he was contented. At the table, James and Brian were discussing a shopping list, of medical supplies and food, that James would look for while they were docked at the Lighthouse. He leaned back against the countertop. In that moment he was gripped by a gratitude too immense to articulate: for the ship, and the people aboard it, and the great empty nothing that held it aloft.

-

It took them fifteen hours to fly from Olympia to Aaronson’s station, but when the Lighthouse loomed up before them it seemed so sudden. Drifting and twisting in its orbit, it always seemed to catch them by surprise even when they were headed right for it, coordinates locked on. Ray switched off the throttle and let the Jet Star coast to its dock. 

The Lighthouse was a way station out towards the rim, and it was easy enough to find work there, now. Inside, there were rows and rows of shops, and as soon as they were out of the Jet Star’s hangar, Ray had to grab onto Brian’s elbow to make sure they didn’t get separated in the rush and pull of the crowd. Aaronson was a good man, but it was better to take backup, even if you were dealing with good men. Goodness wasn’t a constant this far out.

Frank and James were heading in the opposite direction, Bob tailing them, under Ray’s direction to “keep them out of trouble” while they got supplies: some desperately needed fuel cells, any medical supplies James thought were necessary. Something nice for dinner, if they had money left over, which they almost never did. Ray had quietly told Frank to ask around about a replacement intake valve. There was no way they could afford it with what they had now, but Aaronson usually paid half upfront, and if it was a big enough job… He didn’t want the rest of the crew to worry, but the takeoffs were getting more risky the longer they waited. It was keeping him up at night. He kept Brian close by his side and they battled through a slipstream in the crowd to an elevator that would take them down to where Aaronson liked to do business.

He owned this whole station, or that’s what Brian said. It wasn’t a widely known fact - there was power in being underestimated, and Aaronson capitalized on that regularly. How Brian knew half the shit he did, Ray could never guess. They rode down the elevator in silence. It was one of those big elevators, suitable for freight and livestock, and it smelled richly of bodies - animal and human - and the sharp scent of atmo, sulfuric and warm. Like stardust. It sped down the elevator shaft that, against the station’s artificial gravity, made Ray’s stomach lurch. He put a hand on Brian’s shoulder to steady himself.

“He didn’t give you any idea of what kind of job this is?” Ray asked, not for the first time. Brian and Aaronson went way back, before Brian had decided a life on one planet wasn’t for him. None of them knew much about what Brian used to do before he’d signed on with Ray, except that he’d come aboard with nicer clothes than the rest of them and a handful of contacts that had gotten them out of more than a few scrapes over the years.

Brian shook his head. “I’d tell you if I knew, Captain.”

The elevator shuddered to a halt at the very bottom of the shaft and the odd, horizontal doors swept upward and downward to admit them into a dimly lit hallway. Like the rest of the Lighthouse, it was unadorned and starkly industrial. Corrugated metal walls, bare fluorescent bulbs every half-dozen yards, the grilles of steam vents puffing atmospherically as the station hydraulics kept them in motion. Ray unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Being down here - where the churning of the station’s machinery kept the air warm and humid, and where the business of making deals and exchanging money and planning crimes kept him anxious and on edge - always made him sweat.

At the end of the hall they made a sharp right, and then a left shortly thereafter, and then - incongruous against the backdrop of grime and cobwebs - they stood before an elegantly burnished wooden door.

“Ready?” Brian asked, his fist poised to knock.

Ray nodded.

Brian rapped sharply, three times, and the door swung soundlessly inward.

Aaronson’s rooms were not opulent; they did not belie the wealth he must’ve had. They were simple, furnished with well-made wooden furniture: a broad desk; simple, straight-backed chairs; a bookcase which seemed charmingly antiquated for someone of his status. Aaronson was dressed simply as well, in well-cut black trousers and a high-collared shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow, standing beside the desk.

“How’ve you boys been?” he said, and gestured for them to take seats on the other side of the desk.

The job was simple enough. Over the course of maybe half an hour Aaronson laid out a series of blueprints, outlined the weak points in security, and gave them limited specs on the cargo. Aaronson couched every answer in reassurances: “I know your crew can handle that,” he told Ray, in response to a question about the target vault. This wasn’t the first time Ray had stolen for pay, or stolen for Aaronson.  There was no honest reason to be so coy.

“I think we can do you right for this one,” Ray said, tapping the stack of schematics and blueprints with his forefinger. “Thanks for thinking of us.”

“Of course,” Aaronson replied smoothly. “Now, I know you’ll be wanting the details on payment.”

Ray swallowed. He didn’t like to talk about money, not even when it was necessary. He leaned back a little in his chair - this was Brian’s area of expertise, the negotiation, the anxious back-and-forth.

“We’ll be needing something up front,” Brian said easily. “I trust that’s not a problem?”

“No, no,” Aaronson said. “If you find it agreeable, I’d be happy to offer you two hundred credits now, and an additional four hundred forty on delivery.”

Beside him, Ray could see Brian stiffen. Aaronson rarely paid more than two hundred and fifty credits for an entire job, in two installments.

Brian leaned forward a little in his chair. “Forgive me for asking, Craig, but what’s the fucking catch?”

Aaronson laughed, and like all his mannerisms, it was contained. “No catch. The pay is proportionate to the cargo. It’s very important to my contacts that this transaction is carried out with… discretion.”

“What’s this cargo that’s worth double your usual rate, if you’ll pardon my suspicion?”

Ray wanted to clap his hand over Brian’s mouth. With the Jet Star in the state she was in, the cargo couldn’t matter less to him.

“That’s not relevant,” Aaronson said. “Besides, I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. I make it a point not to ask; I find too many details get in the way of business.”

“We’re of a mind on that,” Ray said uneasily. The longer they lingered the more antsy he was getting. He began gathering the schematics, rolling the pages together into a tube.

“I thought we might be,” Aaronson said. He bent and opened a drawer in his desk. Ray could hear the sound of coins jingling, and he passed the paper to Brian so he could accept the fine linen bag when Aaronson offered it to him.

They said goodbyes, and one of Aaronson’s men showed them out of his chambers and back to the freight elevator. Only when they were in motion did Ray let his posture ease. He sagged against Brian.

“You’d think I’d get used to that part,” he said.

“If you did, you wouldn’t have a reason to keep me around,” Brian said. He sounded fond, but beneath it, withdrawn. Worried. That gave Ray plenty of pause, not that he was about to press him about it. Their working relationship depended far too much on Brian keeping track of the big picture so that Ray was free to fiddle with the details. “I can’t say I like this, though.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Ray said. “But it’s a sight better than the ship burning out under the radar.” The coin weighed heavy in his coat pocket. Brian nodded slowly.

Back in the Jet Star’s hangar, Frank and Bob were busily unloading fuel cells from a borrowed dolly.

“Frankie!” Ray called, and they both looked up. “Tell me you found somebody with an intake valve.”

Frank cocked his head. “I asked around, Cap, but there’s nothing used up for trade, and nobody who’d sell a new one to us for less than eighty cred.” He smiled ruefully. “I’m sure I can figure out something for the one we’ve got -”

He cut himself off when he saw Ray rummaging through his pocket, and his eyes went huge and round when Ray pulled out the money from Aaronson and counted out eighty credits.

“Go buy it. I’m not taking risks this job.” He turned to Bob. “Go with him? Make sure he doesn’t get mugged?”

Bob gave him a thumbs up and followed Frank out of the hangar. Frank was practically vibrating with excitement. It was rare for him to get anything  _ used  _ for the Jet Star, let alone a brand new part. Ray sometimes thought Frank’s loyalty was less to the crew than to the ship. He watched him slow down so that Bob could walk side-by-side with him, and watched Frank take his hand and lean up to kiss him, and thought maybe that was a hasty conclusion to draw.

“You sure we won’t need that coin?” Brian asked.

“Sure we will,” Ray answered. “Won’t be able to spend it if the engine gives out during takeoff, though.” He passed Brian the somewhat lighter bag. “Stick that in the safe for me?”

Brian nodded and headed into the ship.

Now alone in the hangar, Ray breathed in deep. It smelled cold and empty enough to sting, like space, still. His ship. She settled on inelegant feet, the great bulk of her broad-shouldered body perched above them, her bay door open and spilling yellow light. He loved her in the way that grandparents love one another, in that moment.

He lingered for a minute, savoring the feeling of being alone with his ship, his extraordinary lady, before he headed up the gangway and into her belly. He checked the med bay first and found it empty, but with two new-looking bottles of antiseptic and an unopened pack of sutures. The kitchen was empty, too, with a few cans of hermetically sealed vegetables waiting to be stored in the pantry. James was terrible at putting things away.

Ray was still sorting the canned goods in their cupboards when he heard James clear his throat behind him, and he turned around, a can of cubed potatoes in one hand and a vacuum-sealed bag of dehydrated peas in the other. James was leaning up against the counter, one hand extended towards Ray. He was offering him a fresh, red apple.

“You better not have blown all our coin on fruit,” Ray scolded, but he couldn’t quite carry it off. He set the can of potatoes down and took the apple, biting into it, relishing it.

James’s thin lips pulled to one side in a smirk. “It was a freebie with the canned stuff, in exchange for taking out some stitches. Hey, come on, give me half.”

Ray passed the apple back. James was always giving more than he needed to. Ray guessed that’s what made him a good doctor, and maybe also what had put him in such dire straights that he’d left Liberty with a crew like this.

“We make it out of this job in one piece, I expect we’ll be able to swing some fresh corn, maybe some tomatoes. If you want to start thinking of treats now.” Ray wrestled the apple back from James and licked a rivulet of juice off the side. James wrinkled his nose.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Captain,” James said. “I don’t think we’ve  _ ever  _ had enough cred for fresh tomatoes.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve never had a job that pays this well.” Ray passed the apple back. It was more core than anything now, big hunks bitten out of both sides. James turned it around in his hand and bit some flesh off the top.

“You gettin’ us into trouble again?” he asked.

“That’s what you signed up for.”

Before long they could hear Frank clattering up the gangway and the muffled sounds of his voice, interspersed with soft-spoken murmuring that could only be Bob. They’d be prepped for liftoff within the hour, god willing. He clapped James on the shoulder and headed for the bridge.

-

The Jet Star detached from the Lighthouse easily and left it, tilting in its orbit, in her wake. This far out towards the rim there was little to hinder them, and Ray checked their coordinates before leaving the navigation system to do its best with his instructions. In the galley, his crew was waiting for him.

“Captain?” Bob asked. As a rule Bob was incurious, and the look on his face told Ray that Brian had talked about their meeting with Aaronson already.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you already know?”

Brian had the presence of mind to look a little chagrined.

“Sounds like this is a proper heist,” Frank said. “I saw the blueprints and everything.”

And if Frank had seen the blueprints, that meant  _ everyone  _ would know what was on them whether he liked it or not. Ray took comfort and pleasure in Frank’s faults almost as much as they annoyed him - he was an incorrigible gossip, and mulishly stubborn, though they both were, and as difficult as those qualities sometimes made their daily life, Ray was grateful to them. To have seen every fault and talent manifest in Frank as they grew up together. He had been badly burned in the air raid which killed his parents, and Frank’s family had treated him not as a burden, but as a gift. A second son. Frank was his brother, and brothers annoyed each other, but they also needed each other, it was undeniable.

And all that said, Ray wasn’t the type to be anything but transparent with his crew. It was just that there was something about this job… He didn’t like it, he didn’t feel good about it. But they were out of other options.

“I guess you could call it a heist,” Ray said. He crossed the galley and took down a glass jar of whiskey, uncapped it, and took a bracing swallow before handing it off to James. “Here’s what’s what.”

They had a course plotted for Chelsea, an industrious moon closer in towards the center of their tilt-a-whirling planetary system, populated mainly by lower-echelon government employees. Once they landed they’d use the blueprints Aaronson had given them, which outlined the building that housed the Bureau of Records. They were to get in, acquire a certain file, and get back out undetected. Ray had a few ideas about how to pull that one off, but they had a six day journey in which to plan.

“That’s it?” Frank asked when Ray finished outlining the job. Bob cuffed him on the back of the head and they smiled at each other.

“Fewer of us go in, the better, if discretion is Aaronson’s primary concern,” Bob said. “Might do to leave the goblin home.”

Frank glowered at him but didn’t protest.

“It’s looking like a three man job,” Ray told him. “Doc, you good to babysit?”

James nodded, and smothered a laugh when Frank grabbed for the whiskey, pout still firmly in place.

“Good,” Ray said. “Let’s see about dinner.”

-

Over the next several days they devised a plan. Ray stayed up late with Frank, who had a mind for schematics, poring over the blueprints and planning primary routes, alternate routes, escape plans. The Bureau of Records was not  _ so  _ heavily guarded, for a government building, but the guards they did have were posted at regular intervals and armed with plasma guns. Ray had left a planning session hastily one night and woken James up in an odd panic, wanting to know how well-equipped they would be to deal with serious burns.

James had reached out blindly in the dark, patted Ray’s entire face with his palm, and mumbled, “I’m a very good doctor” before rolling over and going back to sleep.

They’d taken a day to land planetside and visit the trading outpost at Sol Diablo and better equip themselves - for even the smallest parts of their plan to work they would need to be able to talk to each other, something they couldn’t even do through the ship’s PA, the shape they were in now. Ray parted reluctantly with thirty-five credits to supply them with subtle, in-ear communicators - a set of three for him, Brian, and Bob, with a clunkier, more antiquated one Frank could keep on the ship to talk to them.

Ray was feeling good about the plan, if for nothing else than the fact that it was simple. The Bureau was tall, and had no proper exits besides the front doors and the landing pad on the roof, guaranteed to be rife with police, but they only had to get up to the seventh floor and then back down. There was a rent-by-the-hour honeycomb of bays for visiting ships beside the building where Frank and James could hunker down and wait to scoop them up, or - god forbid - go in after them. They had a schedule of the routine guard sweeps for each floor. They had memorized their routes and quizzed each other until the blueprints danced, imprinted, behind their eyelids when they went to sleep.

The day of, Ray set the autopilot and rallied the crew to descend on Brian’s room. A large part of the plan hinged on Brian being charming and attractive - something he insisted he always was, but Ray had recently seen him eat spilled oatmeal off his own t-shirt, so he wanted to do… a bit of a quality assurance check. The four of them stood around and watched Brian put together first one outfit, then another, then back to the first shirt but with the trousers of the second, and so on. At Ray’s insistence, he shaved more thoroughly than he usually did, and buttoned his collar all the way up so that the tattoo on the side of his neck was mostly hidden.

“Well?” Brian said at last, turning in a slow circle so they could admire the final product.

Ray paused. He didn’t want to jinx it by saying what he was thinking, which is that he’d never seen Brian look so nice. “I suppose it’ll have to do.”

Suitably dressed, the five of them trooped out to make the final preparations for the job, ready for Ray to guide them down to the planet and, they hoped, an easy payday.

-

Even from far away Chelsea looked different. They were a couple hours out from landing yet, and the moon was already a glittering jewel poised in the center of the Jet Star’s front window. The frontier planets out on the rim - Liberty, where James was from, and Brunswick, where Ray and Frank had grown up, and dozens of others besides - never seemed like more than roasted brown specks from this distance. Chelsea was studded all over with perfectly imperfect man-made lakes, and as they approached Ray could begin to see the suggestion of grid lines where the streets were measured out against one another.

A moon like Chelsea could never be a home, as far as he was concerned.

When they broke atmo Brian joined Ray on the bridge, settling into the navigator’s chair and gazing down toward the curve of the planet along the horizon. It was still early morning by the local clocks, and their plan necessitated entering the Bureau of Records as close to closing as possible. Ray coasted the Jet Star through the upper atmosphere, feeling her pull just barely against the sudden presence of wind resistance. The Bureau was over the lip of the horizon, still.

“Not too late to back out, sir,” Brian said. He said it like he meant it to be a joke, but it wasn’t.

Ray considered his first mate’s nervousness. The stiff way he pulled his shoulders back and dropped them, resettling himself, and the uneasy scrape of his palm over his unfamiliarly smooth jaw. There was no use prodding at him now.

“Yeah, it is,” Ray answered finally. “Double check the supplies, if you would. I want this moon in our wake before sunset.”

-

To placate Frank they’d landed early near a market, and let him and James take a fieldtrip into it with a little bit of the remains of the advance Aaronson had given them. Ray checked and rechecked his weapons, the schematics, the path through the Bureau to where their prize was waiting. The sun crested in the sky above them and then began its descent towards the opposite horizon, and Ray flew in its wake to park them beside the slate-grey protrusion that the Bureau of Records building made against the city’s landscape.

It was time.

The three of them left the ship and walked across the plaza to the front of the building. The first hurdle was directly inside, was the reason Brian was so gussied up. There would be a woman at the front desk - a girl, really - who was known to be inattentive, and to have a certain predilection for short brunettes. Frank had volunteered immediately and the rest of them - even Bob - had vetoed him at once for being “too much of a wild card” at the subtle art of flirting.

The front desk was also the hub for the security monitors, each displaying a rotating view of the various upper hallways and rooms. It was this girl’s job to report anything suspicious and dispatch personnel, if necessary. Brian would go in first and engage her in conversation, and keep her there for the twenty minutes they hoped it would take to run the job.

And already, there was a hitch.

“That doesn’t look like somebody named Claire,” Ray said. Behind the front desk was a tall man with glasses and dark blond hair swept back from his forehead. “Fuck.”

Brian turned to him and put a brotherly hand on his shoulder. “Ray, I know how to romance a man. Let’s go.”

And with that he was through the doors, striding confidently up to the desk, and leaning his forearm over the top of it like a cartoonish caricature of an unvirtuous woman. Behind him, Ray and Bob entered the lobby as surreptitiously as they could.

Getting in was the easy part - of course it was. No one was suspicious when you hadn’t done anything yet, when you and your compatriot were innocently riding the elevator to the seventh floor and stepping out in a late rush of other people going about their business. Ray kept Bob’s unmistakable blond head in the corner of his eye as they both made their way past a receptionist’s desk and to the men’s room on the far side of the room.

Inside, there was a stall with an air duct above it - if they timed it right, they would both be able to get in entirely unwitnessed. Ray unscrewed the grate over the duct and steadied his foot against the toilet lid, ready to hoist Bob in.

“Ready?” he asked. If there was a real point of no return, this was it. Bob nodded, and grabbed Ray’s hand with his own, sweatier one, and hauled himself up into the vent. Ray followed him gracelessly, turning around enough to replace the grate as well as he could.

The vent echoed with the strange, hollow slaps of their palms, the shuffling sounds of their knees on metal as they crawled forward. Ray remembered Frank going over the schematics with him: this vent burrowed through the wet wall - it was well insulated, they wouldn’t be immediately discovered through noise, but as Frank had put it, “don’t have a party in there, Captain.”

It wasn’t far from the bathroom to the back of the records office, but it was slow going between the limited space and navigating in the dark. Ray scraped the heel of his hand on one of the steel ribs supporting the inside of the vent and cursed, and Bob started to turn around to help before he hissed, “I’m fine, keep going.”

The other side of the duct opened out into an underutilized service hallway, and Ray and Bob waited behind its grate, watching for the patrol that came by once an hour. A pair of chatting security guards walked past and turned a corner, and they waited a few minutes before carefully unscrewing the grate and dropping to the floor.

From here it was supposed to be simple. They turned the same corner the guards had and, finding it unoccupied, ducked into the second door along the corridor. It was stacked floor to ceiling with filing cabinets.

“Hell,” Ray said. “You wrote that number down, right?”

Bob pulled a crumpled scrap of paper out of his pocket and peered at it. “We’re looking for file BWT-9882.”

The two of them set to work.

The filing cabinets themselves seemed not to be organized alphabetically, and it took both of them searching to find a drawer marked “BWT.” It was at the top of one of the stacks of cabinets, and Ray had to pull over a sliding ladder to reach it. Once inside, however, papers and plastic data disks and cables seemed to explode out at him, and he swore and pushed them down with his palms, thumbing through the tabbed file folders until he came to 9982.

Ray stuck his hand into the file and groped around. At first he thought it was empty. He pulled the entire folder up and opened it and, to his dismay, a computer chip housed in black plastic came tumbling out.

“Fuck!” Ray exclaimed and grabbed for it, nearly toppling from the ladder, missing it entirely. Fortunately for him, Bob - steadying the ladder with one hand - reached up and handily caught it in his palm. “Thanks.”

“You got it, Captain,” Bob said. “Let’s get outta here.”

Everything was spilling out of the drawer - maps of the outer rim; photos of terraforming equipment and frontier towns; in one nauseating case, a crumbling photograph of the market in Brunswick where Ray had lost his parents. Ray forced the photo away from himself, shoving loose paper back into place on top of it as best he could before shouldering the drawer shut. He felt queasy. There wasn’t time, there was no point in looking. Ray had given up trying to force logic onto his parents’ deaths years ago. He repeated that to himself as he willed his heart to stop hammering, as he wiped his clammy palms on his trousers.

He forced his discomfort down into the same place in his heart that housed the guilt of being a career thief. He took a deep breath.

Ray clambered down and together he and Bob replaced the ladder. Ray slotted the chip in a foam-lined case Aaronson had given them along with the blueprints. “Precious cargo,” he’d said then. Ray put the case in the inside pocket of his jacket.

Getting in was easy enough, but getting out was always harder. They couldn’t risk going back through the grate - it was high up in the hallway, and they wouldn’t be able to get up to it without causing something of a ruckus. Frank had located an emergency stairwell for them, just at the end of the corridor, that should ideally take them all the way to the ground floor.

“We’re on our way,” Ray said over the portable com, and got back a whoop from Frank and a blip of static acknowledgement from Brian who, hopefully, was still chatting at the reception desk.

Ray pushed the stairwell door open and immediately knew he’d made a mistake. The doppler roar of an alarm rose from all around them, and helplessly, Ray heard the stairwell door clang shut. They could go up or down.

“Schechter, do you have a handle on dispatch? Once for yes!” Ray hissed into the com. A moment, and then a single bubble of static.

The stairwell, bleached white under fluorescent lights, stretched out above and below them, echoing with the shrilling of the alarm.

“Down we go,” Ray said, and started down. They made it to the fifth floor before they heard the door above them bang open and the thud of footsteps on the stairs.

“Oh, hell. Frankie, tell me you’re gonna be ready for us,” Ray hissed into his portable com. He tugged Bob by the elbow and they ducked into a supply cupboard packed with fire extinguishers and first aid kits, holding their breath as the stiff clatter of guard boots on laminate floor passed them.

“Engine’s already running, Cap, where do you want me?” Frank asked, and thank god the port coms worked better than the system installed on the ship.

“On my left. We’ll be comin’ out the front.”

With the goods well in hand and Bob following close and silent behind him, Ray was trying not to worry too much. This complicated things, sure, but if they could get get out of this stairwell they could get home free, Ray was sure. Scooping Brian out of reception might be tricky, but if he knew Brian at all, he’d have laid down some kind of contingency plan within the first thirty seconds.

“Come on,” Ray said, jerking his head back to the stairs. They were - according to carefully memorized blueprints - on the building’s south side, and they’d need to hustle to get back to anywhere where they might blend into a crowd. Bob kept close by his side and they made their way down another flight of stairs before pausing on the landing. A security checkpoint was waiting on the other side of the stairwell doors, the only obstacle between them and the relative freedom of the unrestricted access areas of the building, and the bustling crowds those would offer them.

“When I open the door you go left. There shouldn’t be more than two guys out there.”

Bob nodded and unclipped the holster of his gun, ready for a quick draw. There was something equal parts comforting and terrifying about having a mercenary on his payroll that didn’t think twice about killing.

“On my count,” Ray said, and held up three fingers. He counted down silently, keeping eye contact with Bob, and when he put down his last finger he jerked the door open and they both rushed out.

The two guards on the other side both gave startled shouts as Ray and Bob tumbled through the open door. Bob grabbed the left hand guard by the collar and brought the butt of his pistol down on his head in one swift movement. The guard crumpled to the floor.  _ That,  _ Ray thought, grappling with the guard on the right,  _ is what we pay him for. _ Ray shoved the other guard back against the wall but couldn’t find purchase, couldn’t free a hand to incapacitate him. The guard was shouting for backup and while the corridor was mercifully empty now, it wouldn’t be for much longer if he kept up this racket.

“Bryar!” Ray hissed, and Bob sidled casually over and clubbed the second guard twice with the butt of his gun. Ray dropped the guard in a heap beside the door. “Thanks,” he said.

“Thank me later,” Bob said, already making for the other end of the hallway at a brisk jog. They slowed to an anxious walk as they rounded the corner and found themselves in a broad atrium, swarms of end-of-the-day employees and patrons to the Bureau hurrying to finish what business they had. In one corner, a coffee cart was closing up shop for the day. Ray elbowed Bob in the side and pointed to an elevator bank across the atrium and, beside it, an open staircase. They made for it with as much casual grace as they could muster.

At the bottom of the stairs they were nearly back to where they’d come in. Brian was still at the security desk, leaning over to speak to the now obviously-interested guy behind it. Ray whistled sharply to him and he jerked his head up.

“That’s my ride,” he said to the guy behind the desk, and extended his thumb and pinky in the universal sign for “call me,” a wolfish smile on his lips.

The three of them pushed through the front doors and out into the refreshing Chelsea air, where an evening sky was unfurled above them, orange and pink and marbled with wispy clouds. The Jet Star was hovering, ready for them, to the left of the front entrance, and as they ran for it the bay door extended to meet them.

“This is your captain speaking,” Frank said over the ship’s intercom. Ray could hear him giggling even through the static. “Please take your seats, we are cleared for takeoff.” As the bay door closed, Ray could just glimpse a stream of security officers coming out of the building, looking around, looking at their ship. Even as they seemed to notice the Jet Star she was pushing up with her thrusters, raising herself gracefully into the air.

The cargo bay had no windows, and as Ray strapped himself in beside Bob and Brian in the jump seats he felt the familiar uneasiness of riding in his ship, but not at its helm. He could hear Frank laughing madly into the intercom, taking them up into the tangerine sunset and then beyond it. The case containing the chip felt bulky in his pocket. He wondered, not for the first time, what information on it was so valuable.

The ship lurched, a sure sign that they had broken atmo and were leaving Chelsea well behind. Beside him Bob unbuckled his straps and stood up. The Jet Star’s artificial gravity systems had taken over after they’d broken Chelsea’s orbit, and they could walk freely, if unsteadily, as she adjusted to the vacuum of space.

Above the cargo bay, James peered around the doorway that led to the corridor where the crew’s bunks were located. “Anybody hurt?” he asked hopefully.

“Not this time, Doc,” Ray said. He unbuckled his own straps. “I scraped my hand up, though, if you wanna kiss it better.”

James made a face. “We get the goods?”

“You know it. Two weeks between us and payday.” He made his way to the stairs out of the cargo bay. “We can go on vacation somewhere where nobody likes us,” he said dreamily. “I’ll get shot, you can stitch me up. Like old times.”

“You sure do know how to romance a fella,” James said sardonically. “Come on, help me with dinner. Maybe if I give you a knife, I’ll finally have an occasion to put those sutures to use.”

-

Mikey was asleep when the hail got to them through the static, and Gerard wasted twenty good minutes wringing his hands about whether or not to wake him. But there was no “better safe than sorry” in this situation, and if he was going to be sorry either way he figured he should pick the avenue that might at least get them paid. He twisted the latch on the door to Mikey’s bunk and climbed down the ladder, dropping to the ground when he was pretty sure he wouldn’t crash into anything.

“Mikes,” he hissed. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear nobody was here: the rumpled sheets were balled up around Mikey in a way that only vaguely suggested the body underneath them.

Gerard sat on the edge of the bed and shook what he thought was Mikey’s knee, or maybe his ankle.

“Nhh,” Mikey grumbled. “Why.”

“We got a hail, I need you to take a look at this.” Gerard used his gentlest voice, but Mikey still groaned, long and loud.

“Okay,” he said, kicking the sheets off himself. “Okay, I’m up.”

He followed Gerard up to the bridge of their ship, or what passed for it. Their ship was a sporty little craft meant to fly unmanned, or with a skeleton crew. He and Mikey were more than she needed. The Séance was an independent woman.

“Look at this,” Gerard said, swiping strategically from left to right over the ship’s touchscreen controls. He pulled up the hail, then several digitized blueprints, and finally a handful of personnel records.

“What am I looking at?” Mikey asked. He still looked half asleep, and he groped for his glasses in the top pocket of his shirt before settling them crookedly on his nose and peering through them at the hail.

“On the face of it, it’s recon,” Gerard answered. “This ship is suspected of involvement with that heist on Chelsea a couple days back, and we’re supposed to catch them in it before they fence the goods.”

“So what’d you wake me up for?” Mikey looked confused. “The job’s a cakewalk, you could’ve just hailed them back and accepted.” He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t have woken me up unless something made it complicated, Gee.”

Gerard’s eyes shifted guiltily to the side. “Well,” he started, and rolled his thumb over the ship’s personnel records, drawing up the crew manifest. “It might be nothing, but…” He swallowed. “There was something about the way they asked, and look.” He pulled up a page on the ship’s captain. “They got a DNA match from some blood at the scene for this guy. Mikey… he’s from Brunswick. He was there.”

-

Frank wanted to go back to Brunswick. This was absurd for an uncountable number of reasons, least of which was that they never went  _ home _ after a job as below-board as this, they would never dream of putting Frank’s family - both their family - in danger like that. Other, pettier concerns, too: there was nothing to do on Brunswick; it was a painful place for both of them to be, although only Ray had lost his parents there; they had a crew with a mind of its own, and no sentimentality attached to one of the odd dozen clay-streaked moons on the rim that were all the same, always.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Brian and Bob had concocted a plan to take their collective earnings and treat themselves to a vacation - nothing too swanky, they’d stay out of the inner orbit of planets, but there were places - respectable, clean places - where they could set down, stay in a hotel, swim in a lake and walk in a forest and be bothered by no one. A place to lay low, without the typical grime of most places one may lay low.

James said he wasn’t bothered what they did next so long as they were eating well and he was able to send some of his share of the money back to his mother as soon as possible.

“Not going to push us to visit Liberty?” Ray had asked him, almost teasing, but worried his words would rub up against the sharp edge of something true.

James shrugged. “Same reason you’re against Brunswick, I guess,” he said. “I’m not looking to get my mom in trouble.”

They actually ended up on Liberty more often than probably anywhere else - it was a mining planet, veined with salt and ore and mineral deposits, and often had an easy freight job for them if they were passing through. James’s mother was happy to put them all up for a couple of days. They could sometimes find spare parts for the Jet Star for cheaper than they might at a trading post like the Lighthouse, or the market at Sol Diablo. If there were less of a risk of them being followed, Ray would’ve suggested it himself.

Ray was making a point to fly under the radar, as it was. After Frank had taken the ship out of atmo - and after James had insisted on looking at the cut on Ray’s palm and then, humiliatingly, cleaning it and giving him three neat stitches - Ray had plotted a long course that would take them out of the way of most of the major shipping channels. They would make a pit stop near Sol Diablo for fuel if they needed it, but otherwise Ray was reasonably certain they wouldn’t encounter another ship between here and the busy pocket of sky that housed the Lighthouse.

For three days they flew in a lazy series of curves, avoiding the traffic around Humboldt, where Bob was from, then ducking around and below the network of satellites that spanned the distance from Humboldt to Pike, its furthest moon.

They had actually halfway settled on a plan of action after the drop-off, and Ray was proud of it, of its sensibility and the way it seemed it might be able to please everyone on board. He was up on the bridge, making arrangements. They were going to drop off the disc with Aaronson and take a circuitous path down to Archer, a farming planet further down the rim where they had a couple of contacts willing to shelter them for a few weeks in exchange for some labor. It was unglamorous but it had the added bonus of spending a little time planetside, outdoors, breathing air kissed by the scent of wheatfields and cattle. After they were well out of possession of the chip, they’d take their earnings from Aaronson and make a tidy circuit of places they actually wanted to go: back to Pike, to lay around under a canopy of green trees and eat well and sleep all day; to a farming town on Franklin where they’d be able to buy fresh produce; back to Liberty to look for a little work and to see James’s family.

Frank was still pushing Brunswick, and Ray was considering various methods of deterring him - indefinitely, though he didn’t need to know that - when a hail came through on the com.

He opened up a channel and his screen was immediately filled with the angular, serious head and shoulders of a stranger.

“Captain Toro?” he asked, without preamble.

“Speaking,” Ray said uneasily.

“Please halt for boarding,” the stranger said. He sounded bored.

“Uh…” Ray said. “No?”

The face disappeared from view, leaving the back of an empty pilot’s chair, and Ray could hear him scuffling around. Then the Jet Star was rocked forcefully to one side, the yoke jerking out of his hands. Several beeping warning lights illuminated and began to shrill. They had taken fire.

The stranger came back into view. “Captain, you’ve a bounty on your head. You’ll want to halt for boarding,” he said, patiently.

Ray leaned back and grabbed the microphone for the ship’s PA.

“Frankie!” he shouted into the staticky channel. “Get to the engine room, we’ve got a tail to lose!”

The Jet Star lurched when the next bolt from the plasma cannon razed her. Ray’d missed the ship in his rearview, somehow - it was sleek and deadly-looking, completely unlike his own vessel, and it had materialized seemingly out of nowhere. It propelled closer to them and through the rearview screens Ray could see the cannon readying another shot, its muzzle glowing bright.

This had to be the ship that had just hailed them, there was no one else around. The hail’s metadata identified it as a private vessel, The Séance.

Ray leaned over the com port. “I know you?” he grunted into the mic, trying to get a handle on the Jet Star as she found her footing.

“Not yet.” The face returned, snowy with static, completely expressionless. “You’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you,” the guy said. His tone was clipped, businesslike. “I’m just the guy whose job it is to get it back.”

Ray said a silent prayer that Frank was paying attention to the engines, and put his hand over the throttle. “Well if you’re just doing your job,” he said into the com, and opened the throttle as far as it would go. “You won’t take it personally when I tell you to go fuck yourself!”

He slapped his hand over the com port controls and the screen went dark, and then they were hurtling forward dangerously fast, so that the stars - always immobile, still points beyond the heavy plastic of the front window - seemed just barely to blur into motion. In the rearview screens the Séance was beginning to fall behind.

“Gimme a hand, Frank,” Ray barked into the Jet Star’s intercom microphone, and he got jubilant static in reply. A moment later something punched them forward even faster, and Ray had to wrestle with the yoke to keep the ship on course. He started to cheer into the microphone, but it died on his lips.

Looming out of the blackness in front of them, from the obvious veil of a cloaking device, was an enormous… Ray couldn’t call it a ship because it looked more like a city, an empire. From its base rose towers and spires, and the front was lit up with a legion of armed plasma cannons like the one mounted atop the Séance but all the more imposing, all trained squarely on the Jet Star. It was a warship, Ray would’ve staked his life on it based on design alone, but he didn’t need to: it bore the United Military insignia on the port side, underneath a legend declaring it the UFS Dreadnaught. Against Ray’s puny cargo ship it looked like a weaponized planet, such was its vastness.

He swore under his breath as the com port flickered to life again, this time featuring - if possible - an even more unfriendly face than that of the bounty hunter on their tail. He had high cheekbones and cold eyes, and he stared unblinkingly into the camera as he spoke.

“Crew of the cargo ship Jet Star please prepare for docking,” he said. Ray was wrestling the throttle shut, still trying desperately to slow them down enough that they wouldn’t go careening straight into the Dreadnaught. As they slowed, he could see the Séance catching up behind them, herding them forward, hemming them in.

“Fuck!” Ray slammed his hand on the console. Ahead of him he saw a dock open for them like a gaping mouth in the face of the warship. He grabbed the intercom. “Frankie, we need a miracle here,” he said.

A bubble of static came back to him.

This fucking ship, where nothing worked except the five of them. There was nothing for it. They couldn’t outmanoeuvre the Dreadnaught in close combat, they couldn’t run with the Séance chasing them. They didn’t have the fuel to burn. All of a sudden the disc in the cargo hold’s safe hardly seemed worth it, the difference between four hundred credits and none seemed an immeasurably small one. The money, the new intake valve, the way they’d seemed to finally,  _ finally  _ be coming into a bit of good luck…. It was pointless. He took his hands off the controls and rubbed his face.

He reached for the com port. It was always going to end, he supposed, like this. In his more arrogant moments he’d imagined it more of a blaze of glory, a chase, a rebel crew shot down doing noble work, but they were no rebel crew. They weren’t noble, they were poor. As he made to steer into the Dreadnaught’s hold, Frank’s voice came over the communicator, audible under the static, but barely.

“Don’t do it, Ray,” he said urgently. “I’ve got a plan.”

The engine supplied power to two thrusters with which Ray could steer, and Frank could manipulate them somewhat more dexterously from the engine room itself. He hurriedly shouted to Ray over the com to prepare for a tight turn, then flipped one of the thrusters around so that the ship pinwheeled away from the Dreadnaught’s open dock. Ray clung to the yoke with both hands, trying to wrestle it back into submission.

Relative to the Dreadnaught, they were upside down, and Ray steered the Jet Star to dive underneath the warship’s massive undercarriage. They were swifter, more maneuverable, but they had no guns on board with which to fight back. He hoped Frank had a plan past this.

A volley of beams from the Dreadnaught’s plasma cannons rained down towards them and Ray swerved to avoid them. One bolt caught the underside of the Jet Star and Frank yelled “She did  _ not  _ like that, Ray!” through the com.

“Shut up and fly!” Ray shouted back, hauling the yoke to the left. They cut a wide arc down and under the Dreadnaught’s battle towers, a bloom of plasma beams following them like a comet tail.

“Ready?” Frank asked. Ray looked out the viewport and saw it, knew exactly what Frank was asking him.

“Go!” Ray said into the com, and opened the throttle again. They were burning fuel faster than they should, but it was their only shot - a gap into that debris field where they’d seen the derelict ship only a couple of weeks ago, where everything was packed too tightly together for a behemoth like the Dreadnaught to safely navigate. More importantly they’d be close by Sol Diablo, where they’d find a refueling station and, with any luck, a haven to hide. They propelled forward at speeds Ray had never before attempted in the Jet Star - he had a white knuckle grip on the steering controls, and smaller pieces of debris pinged off the front of the ship as he swerved to avoid the larger detritus. He watched his rearview as carefully as he could for signs of pursuit, and although the Dreadnaught was lumbering forward, cannons blazing, it was becoming a more and more distant shape behind them. The Séance was the more pressing concern, and Ray watched for its sleek shape as closely as he could while navigating them around the crystallized wreck of the ship they’d seen the last time they’d been out here.

It very nearly seemed as though they were going to get away, like it was that easy, until the bullet-smooth body of the Séance pulled up behind them. They were a little way back, still, maybe halfway between the Jet Star and the warship but gaining fast. Ray swore and gunned the throttle.

And then a miracle happened. The Dreadnaught sent another volley of bolts from her plasma cannons at them, and while they all fell short, Ray saw two bright flares connect squarely with the body of the Séance. Immediately her nose tipped upward, the force of the bolts hitting her causing her to spin and dance. Ray couldn’t look away from the rear view screen. A jet of flame shot out of one of the punctured windows on the Séance. A moment later a general distress beacon came across the waves to him, the Séance pleading for assistance from the warship.

“Fuck,” Ray said. The warship wasn’t changing course - it was headed in the opposite direction of the Séance, making to catch Ray’s ship on the other side of the debris field. Ray didn’t stop to think. He grabbed the mic for the intercom. “Frankie, get up here!”

“Captain?” Frank panted when he burst through the door. He’d clearly run from the engine room.

“I need you to take the helm,” Ray said. He was shouldering on his jacket. “I’m taking the shuttle to save that bounty hunter.”

Frank stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

Ray shrugged. “He’ll be dead if I don’t get over there soon,” he said. “He might be dead already, but I’m not looking to put this ship in the hands of god with this on my conscience.”

Frank sat down behind the controls. “Meet us on Sol Diablo, outside Naranje,” he said. He looked Ray sincerely in the eye, and it must be a bad plan because Frank looked  _ worried.  _ “Be careful, Ray.”

If Frank was worried, Ray didn’t even want to know what Brian thought. He took a last look at Frank in the captain’s chair and headed off towards the shuttle bay.

-

The Jet Star’s shuttle didn’t see much use, but Frank kept it in working order so that in the not unlikely event they were one day sent drifting, they’d have an escape route of sorts. Ray steered back through the debris field. The Séance was in open space, beyond the orbit of the debris around Sol Diablo.

The ship bucked and danced away from Ray’s shuttle and it took him four tries to dock, swearing at the controls. Flames licked out of the engine bay, and where there were flames there must be oxygen leaks, the integrity of the ship’s pressure stabilizers compromised. He stumbled into the airlock already yelling.

“Where are you?” he shouted, for lack of anything more suitable to say. For all he knew the bounty hunter could be dead, touched callously by the vacuum of space, the substance of his body first billowing out in the absence of gravity, popping like a balloon, then shriveling in from the cold and the nothingness of it all. The ship’s hold must not have been breached, though, because he felt no shortness of breath. He yelled again. “Hello?”

Footsteps on the stairs; the unmistakable sound of guns being drawn. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said a voice above and to Ray’s left. There were two men there, the bounty hunter he’d spoken to on the cortex and another, shorter one beside him. It was the shorter one who had spoken – he was at a com port on the wall, furiously dialing in numbers and swearing and not paying any attention at all to the strange man in the hold of his ship. The other, the angular bounty hunter with whose face Ray was passingly familiar, had two plasma pistols trained on him and the cold expression on his face of someone with very few qualms about riddling a stranger with burns.

“Crew of the reconnaissance ship Séance requesting aid,” said the guy at the com port, and he sounded frantic to Ray’s ears. Ray raised his hands in deference to the guns.

“Gerard,” Guns said, and the other guy – Gerard, Ray guessed – looked up from the panel long enough to see Ray and glower.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Gerard said dismissively. He punched in another channel on the cortex and went back to his scripted distress call.

“They’re not coming back,” Ray said lamely. “They’re following my ship. If you want rescue, you better believe in god, because he’s the only one to come for you once I’m out that airlock.” 

“Mikey,” Gerard said, not looking up. “Steal his shuttle.”

Mikey raised both the pistols higher and Ray had just enough time to duck down behind a broad metal panel, knocked loose from the wall, before the sound of gunfire filled the air. He reached for his own pistol and kept it well in hand, but he stood no chance against two armed bounty hunters on their own turf. Mikey was being maybe a little bit careless with his ammunition conservation, but that just made Ray more nervous.

Ray dodged under the stairs, not quite out of the way of two bolts Mikey fired in rapid succession, one of which glinted off the ironwork grille floor of the ship, the other of which grazed the side of Ray’s face. He yelped, then bit down on the sound, edging further back behind the cover of the staircase. He could just see around the corner to where Mikey was headed for the airlock.  _ Fuck. _ He couldn’t let them take the shuttle. They’d leave him to die and not think twice about it, the way he probably should’ve about them.

“Wait!” he said, jumping out so abruptly that Mikey spun to face him. He leveled his gun at Mikey’s chest.

“Gerard,” Mikey said calmly, keeping his pistols by his sides. Then, more urgently,  _ "Gerard." _

“Don’t kill him, Mikey,” Gerard said without looking up. “I think…” And then he looked down and saw Ray’s gun at foolproof firing distance from Mikey, and his face crumpled. “Mikes, we’ve gotta go with him.”

“Well he’s got a gun on me, I don’t see much of a way around that,” Mikey said. Ray was annoyed at how he sounded more petulant than threatened. “You could, you know, help me out.”

“No, it’s…” He stood aside, and Ray moved around, still keeping a steady finger on his trigger, so he and Mikey were both facing Gerard, and so that they could see the view screen. The government warship was quickly becoming an orange-tinted speck amongst the stars. It had no intention of coming back for them.

-

“I won’t apologize for doing my job,” Gerard spat, even as he permitted Ray to zip tie his wrists together behind his back. Ray had disarmed Mikey, and Gerard had nothing on him, and the reality of their situation - the Séance crumbling at their backs, the shuttle barely able to hang on to the airlock - had made the bounty hunters passive, albeit mouthy.

“Same to you,” Ray said. He re-checked Mikey’s wrists, then strapped them both into the passenger seats. “Man’s gotta eat.”

“That’s one way to justify it,” Mikey said under his breath. He was, Ray was realizing, hardly the picture of relentless calm he’d been over the com. When Ray had tied his wrists together, his hands were shaking. He looked clammy and nervous up close. He was stick-thin and tall, willowy the way Gerard was pudgy, shorter, but there was a sameness about them. In mannerisms, in the shape of their mouths.

“You brothers?” he asked, settling into the pilot’s seat. Neither man spoke. “You don’t have to talk to me, but it’s a bit of a flight back to my ship and I don’t have a radio.”

He released the pressure seal he’d made with the airlock of the Séance and propelled away from it, watching it spin gently through the debris behind them. With any luck Frank had shaken the Dreadnaught and was already on the way to the rendezvous point on Sol Diablo, and the Jet Star would be fueled up and ready to take them out to the rim.

“Yes,” Gerard said, eventually. Ray glanced back at him. “We’re brothers.”

Ray nodded. “So bounty hunting is the family business, or…?”

“You could say that,” Mikey interrupted. Ray looked back at them and saw Mikey glaring at Gerard and Gerard looking defiantly back. “Look, I appreciate the, y’know, rescue mission or whatever but I’d really rather not make nice until you tell us what you’re gonna do with us.”

They were clear of the debris, the warship was long gone. Their shuttle trundled along between nothing and nothing, suspended in the vastness of sky and stars.

“I don’t know,” Ray said.

“Cool. Great. Sounds peachy,” Mikey said, shuffling around in his seat.

“I didn’t exactly plan to have hostile captives,” Ray said defensively. He checked their trajectory and angled the ship slightly to the left. Sol Diablo was a ways out yet. “And I don’t decide for the rest of my crew. We’re a team.”

“So they were cool with you coming to rescue us after we tried to shoot you out of the sky?” Gerard asked, and Ray didn’t need to look at him to know his eyebrow was twitched up.

“Well.” Ray remembered the way Frank had looked at him when he’d given him the helm. The unfamiliar look of distrust in Bob’s eyes when he’d passed him in the corridor to the shuttle bay. Even James, who stood by Ray unquestioningly, had followed him to the airlock and put a hand on his arm, asking if he was sure this was a good idea. “Not exactly,” he allowed. “But we’re not killers.”

“I have a government dossier that says otherwise,” Mikey spat.

“Okay, we’re not killers if we can help it,” Ray said. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking questions?”

“That’s how I’d do it in your place,” Gerard said. “Just, y’know, a bit of advice from a professional.”  Ray turned to look at him just in time to catch his grin, fleeting and wry, and the way it dimpled his cheek. He held in a bubble of wholly inappropriate laughter.

“Actually I changed my mind,” Ray said. “We’re gonna play the quiet game.” They were approaching the halo of Sol Diablo’s orbit, still a way out from the rendezvous point by shuttle. “Be good and we’ll drop you near a town.”

“As opposed to?” Mikey asked.

“Still thinkin’ on that.”

-

Ray left the brothers inside the shuttle when he landed. As soon as he jumped down from the shuttle onto the hard-packed desert soil he was set upon by his crew.

“Captain!” That was Frank, barrelling into him and sending them both stumbling, nearly sprawling to the ground. “What happened?”

Brian interrupted him before he could answer: “I swear to God, Toro, if you ever pull that shit again I’m taking your ship -”

“Was he alive? Are we okay?” Bob, hanging back, looking like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

And then there was James, who pulled Frank back and put both hands on Ray’s face, turning it and wincing at the shiny line of the burn running down his jaw and neck. “Ray…” he said. “Let me put something on that before it blisters.”

“In a minute,” Ray said, brushing his hands away. “There were two of them. The ship wasn’t salvageable. And, uh…” He looked down at his boots, scuffed the toe of one into the dirt. “I brought them with me.”

_ “Ray,”  _ Brian said. His eyes were wide and emphatic and furious, uncomprehending.  _ “Why?” _

“I wasn’t gonna leave them to die,” Ray mumbled, feeling inadequate. “We can, I don’t know, barter them back? They’ve got to work for somebody.”

“If I’m right about who they work for, that somebody wasn’t too cheesed about abandoning them in a leaking ship,” Brian said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, tell me they’re secure, at least.”

Ray rolled his eyes. “I’m not a  _ total _ idiot.” He took Mikey’s twin pistols - in better light he could see they weren’t plasma, but fancy, battery-charged laser models - and handed them to Bob. “Souvenir for you.”

Bob turned the guns over in his hand and reluctantly holstered them. “These’ll jam and blow your damn hand off more often than not. You know I’m an analog guy.”

“Yeah, well.” Ray was getting nervous. He wanted - and this was an obscure and unpleasant feeling - for someone to tell him what to do next. He looked at Brian.

“This is your mess, Cap,” Brian told him, and Ray waited, because Brian always had a plan, and he  _ always  _ caved. “Fuck, okay, we’ll bring them along? I guess?”

Frank was looking back and forth between them like a cat watching a particularly leisurely game of ping pong. “For how long? It’s not like we’ve got, y’know, an overabundance of food.”

“We’ll drop them someplace out on the rim,” Brian said. He was sounding more decisive. “We’ll put them down far enough outside of a town that they won’t be able to rat us out before we’re in the wind, close enough that they won’t die. We’ll make the drop with Aaronson’s guy and lay low once we’re paid.”

With some sense of direction, the tension Ray was holding in his shoulders began to ease. What would he do without Brian? Together the five of them trooped back into the shuttle - a tight squeeze, by any metric - and strong armed the bounty hunters out and through the open bay doors of the Jet Star. When they had Gerard and Mikey secured in separate, locked bunks, James took Ray gently by the elbow and steered him into the medical bay to take a closer look at his burn.

Shortly after they’d brought James aboard - nearly five years ago, though it seemed both much more recent and, improbably, like the crew had never existed without him - they had assumed these same positions, Ray perched uncomfortably on the examination table and James, preternaturally calm, in front of him. The scar Ray had from the Brunswick air raid extended from the nape of his neck, down around the right side of his ribcage, and terminated in a starfish imprint of points near his hip. He had been eleven years old then, and the scar tissue had split and stretched as he grew, becoming uglier and uglier, no longer the shiny pink of new skin but instead a clotted splash of whitish grey.

James had asked him to take off his shirt, and had asked him if it was a chemical burn - it wasn’t - and hadn’t asked him anything else about the raid, for which he was intensely thankful. For the first six months he was on the crew, James had routinely applied a thick salve that smelled strongly medicinal and also, curiously, of lemongrass. To Ray’s quiet disappointment his scar hadn’t disappeared, but it no longer felt so tight, no longer itched at any shift in the atmosphere. It was a bizarre intimacy he had shared with no one else, and now, watching James prepare to examine this new burn, he felt guilt and hope and a queasy kind of gratitude, to have someone he trusted so much, who knew how to look after him.

“Y’know,” James said, snapping on a pair of gloves. “You shouldn’t go pulling idiotic stunts like that just to give me something to do.”

The burn was bad, Ray could tell that much just by how his skin felt tight and swollen. He sat up on the examining table and watched James rifle through cabinets and drawers. “You know I like to keep you busy,” he said.

James was uncapping a tube of antiseptic ointment and moving towards Ray with purpose. It hadn’t been so long since the last time he’d been on the other end of James’s stethoscope but it always made him feel like he’d done something wrong, like the little frown of concentration that James wore between his eyebrows was coming from disappointment. This time, he guessed, it probably was.

The ointment stung going on, and Ray flinched away without meaning to. James didn’t react, just put his free hand gently on the other side of Ray’s neck and held him still until the entire burn was painted with antiseptic. Presently the sting subsided and instead he felt the gel cooling the burn.

“It’s not gonna be a fun healing process,” James told him. He was cutting two large squares of gauze methodically to fit the burn. “I don’t think you’ll scar, though.”

Ray sat as still as he could while James taped the gauze in place. It felt bulky and strange, especially where the tape caught and pulled at his cheek. “That’s a shame,” Ray said. “Some people are really into facial scars.”

James smiled. “Yeah, well, you make enough stupid decisions without attracting fetishists,” he said. He shook two anti-inflammatory tablets from a bottle into his palm and held them out to Ray. “That’ll help with the swelling.”

He watched James hook a finger underneath his left glove and peel it off, then do the same with his right. Seeing James like this, a doctor, a man of science, always made Ray feel small and inconsequential. James was so capable. He’d given something up - a small town practice, sure, but a steady job with none of the dangers of taking hostages or fencing stolen intel - to be here. He was so competent. Ray was very grateful for him in that moment. He wanted to apologize, but he wasn’t sure for what, or how, so he didn’t.

“Thanks,” he said, instead, and he tried to convey through his tone all the things he wasn’t sure how to put into words.

James nodded. “You bet,” he said. Ray hoped he understood.

-

They stayed on Sol Diablo for a full day waiting to see if any United Militia ships were headed their way, and when they were convinced they hadn’t been tracked, Frank and Ray walked into town to burn through the rest of their advance from Aaronson. If they were going to make it to the rim they needed fuel cells, badly.

“Awful noble of you to save those goons,” Frank said. He rubbed the side of his hand across his nose. Sol Diablo was dusty, bad for Frank’s lungs, bad for all of them if they stayed there too long. So many of these moons were terraformed weakly, scrub grass and cotton and corn, nothing else would grow.

“Guess so,” Ray said. Truth be told he wasn’t feeling all that noble, or all that smart. “We have a drop-off location from Aaronson yet?”

Frank shrugged. “Brian would know. He still giving you the cold shoulder?”

“Who isn’t?” Ray said. And that wasn’t exactly fair, because here Frank was telling him he was  _ noble,  _ and they’d all agreed to the situation his bullshit conscience had stuck them in. “He’s worried about the overhead, I think.”

“I mean, we don’t  _ have _ to feed them,” Frank said, but Ray knew he was joking. Ray might be an easy mark and a victim of his own moral compass, but Frank was almost as bad.

A stray breeze embossed them with loose soil and Frank coughed into his fist.

They were safe enough, here. Sol Diablo was governed by its inhabitants, was a notoriously difficult place to land a warship. All around its upper atmosphere there were big hunks of detritus, remnants of meteors and settler ships and satellites. But there was the matter of the chip and the rendezvous, and the complication of their accidental hostages. Ray felt momentarily dizzy as the realization hit him, how much he’d endangered all of them. How he could just as easily not be here, now. 

At the market they loaded a cart with fuel cells and freeze-dried packets of the cheapest protein they could find. Frank wandered off and came back with a contract, twenty credits to run a couple of spare engine parts out to a trader on Olympia within the month. In easy quiet, Ray and Frank loaded the machinery into the cart next to the fuel cells and, as well-equipped as they were able to be, set off for the plains where the Jet Star was set down. 

The sun rode low on the distant horizon, making the fields of wheat and scrubgrass glow in a vicious palette of orange and amber. Ray could feel Frank watching him.

The cart’s wheels clattered over a gravely stretch of the road. The way that every frontier planet was the same, unpaved and untamed and kissed in tones of sand and gold by the faraway sun around which their planetary system pinwheeled. It made Ray ache for home. For any home. He wanted to wander into the fields of wheat to feel them bend around him and to lay down in the middle somewhere and sleep, warmed by the heat of the soil.

“Captain,” Frank said, and brought Ray back to himself. The Jet Star had loomed up from behind the crest of a small hill; they were practically upon her. Ray could see James sitting on the threshold of the open bay door, a book in his hands, watching for them. James waved, and when they were close enough, called out.

“You’re just in time for dinner!”

-

Ray had a covered plate balanced in one hand and the other on the deadbolt of the bounty hunter’s bunk, and he paused for a deep breath before sliding the latch open and going inside. Gerard was there, alert and nervous on the bed, looking like he hadn’t relaxed his posture at all in the last six hours, much less taken his eyes from the door. He twitched away from Ray like a spooked horse, and Ray examined the strange mix of guilt and defiance he felt in response. He had spent a long time schooling his soft face into something hard, the face of a man who would not be underestimated or downtrodden, but he didn’t much savor the idea of anyone fearing him like this, flinching away as though he might strike them for no reason. He supposed he didn’t know what Gerard knew about him – maybe very little, maybe everything. His arrest record, surely - nothing to write home about, but Ray had been caught in more than a few brawls in his smuggling career. The reason for the flinch, then.

“Brought you dinner,” he said, needlessly, holding the plate out to Gerard.

Gerard didn’t take it. He kept his eyes steady on Ray, but said nothing.

The bunk was spare but it was a far cry from the holding cells Ray had seen on genuine warships. It was, he liked to entertain, a comfortable place to spend a journey. He was not ashamed of their living quarters when they brought passengers aboard. He set the plate down on the bedside table and set himself down on the chair opposite Gerard.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. Even to his own ears, though, it wasn’t convincing. “And there’s no poison in that protein, or whatever it is you’re thinking, so you might as well eat. If I was going to kill you I’d shoot you. Torture’s no passion of mine.”

Gerard’s hand twitched towards the tea towel covering the plate, but he snatched it back just as quickly and held it in his lap. His lips were pressed together so tightly that they went white around the edges. They sat together in silence for several minutes, Ray watching the way Gerard held himself perfectly still, Gerard watching the way Ray observed him. Ray wondered if he was keeping himself as still on the inside as he was on the outside, and doubted it.

“I’d like you to leave,” Gerard said, finally. His voice was very even. His face - a strange assortment of features that made him appear both ethereal and, in the blunt jut of his chin, dangerous - was carefully neutral.

Ray looked at him for a long moment, then stood. “I leave, I’m taking that with me,” he said, gesturing to the plate. “I don’t mean you any unkindness, but I can’t trust you alone with it.” The possibilities were endless: he would choke himself to death on the protein, he would shatter the plate and slit his wrists, or lay in wait for Ray to come back and push a shard of ceramic through his chest the second the bunk door swung open. These raised-for-combat bounty hunter types were all the same in one way: they were unpredictable, and limitless.

Gerard watched him but said nothing, and Ray collected the plate and backed out of the bunk, checking the deadbolt behind him.

He’d dispatched Frank to look in on Mikey in the bunk next door, and it took Frank much longer to come back out. By the time he did, Ray had started anxiously pacing up and down the corridor, and Bob had come up from the galley to lean against the wall, drumming his fingers on the door handle and asking Ray every couple of minutes if he should “just go in to make sure nothing happened.” He wouldn’t admit it to Bob, because Bob got skittish more easily than anyone in his line of work had a right to, but Ray was a little bit worried too. Enough so that when Frank finally emerged, carrying an empty plate, Ray let out a sigh of relief he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

“Well?” he asked, when Frank had locked the door behind him.

“He wants to see Gerard.”

“Absolutely not,” Ray said flatly. Behind Frank, Bob nodded in agreement.

“The less they see each other, the better,” he said. “Not like we’re going to drop them planetside without each other. Don’t need them trying to plot a way to take the ship.”

Ray pinched the bridge of his nose. “God. Did he at least eat?”

Frank gave him a look, like,  _ yeah, he’s a starving prisoner, of course he ate _ . “Why? Did Gerard not?”

Ray pushed the plate into Frank’s hands and turned towards the bridge, ignoring the way Frank and Bob were whispering behind him. They got that way, sometimes, and as much as it made him uneasy it also reassured him in some measure, the comfortable solidity of the two of them together.

He settled into his chair behind the throttle and pulled his jacket a little tighter around himself. They were running cooler than they might’ve, stingy with fuel wherever possible, because flying under the radar with government hostages aboard meant taking the longest route possible, and they weren’t exactly growing fuel cells on trees. Ray stared out into the black. Even the stars seemed sparser out here.

-

They got Aaronson’s hail almost a full day after they’d left Sol Diablo. Ray answered from the bridge, watching Aaronson pace in and out of frame on the view screen.

“I must admit, Captain, I was hoping for a smoother retrieval than this,” he said woefully.

Ray gripped the ship’s throttle for lack of anything else to do with his hands. He wished he’d had time to call Brian up to the bridge to take this call with him. “Me too,” he said, finally.

Aaronson paced out of view of the video feed - Ray could hear his muffled footsteps on the carpet in his office. He heard the sound of a drawer being opened.

“I have the rest of your payment here,” he said, and his voice grew steadily stronger over the com as he came back into view. He was holding a linen bag in both hands, heavy with coin, enough to keep them going for a long while. “I’d love for you to come take it off my hands, Captain, but…” he paused. Ray had half a mind to shout for Brian over the ship’s intercom, dignity be damned - he had no head for negotiation, no comfort in discussing money.

“Sir,” he said, trying to keep the desperation clear of his voice. “We have your cargo. We lost our tail at Sol Diablo. Nobody’s been in our rearview since liftoff, and we’re routed through empty space.” He paused. He didn’t like to jinx things. “Complications and all, the job’s good as done.”

Aaronson turned the bag in his hands, watching the way the mass of coins shifted first one way, then the other, listening to them clink against one another. He looked up. “I hope so, Captain,” he said, finally.

“We ought to make the rendezvous in eight days,” Ray said, and he couldn’t help the uptick, the questioning note, the thread of helplessness that slipped out socketed somewhere in his words. He bit down on it and waited.

“That’s… A bit longer than I’d hoped,” Aaronson said. He shifted the bag of coins to one hand and lowered it out of the frame of the video feed.

He and Brian had agreed without much discussion not to tell Aaronson about their accidental hostage situation. “Don’t complicate things more than you have to,” Brian had said, sitting in the navigator’s chair on the bridge with Ray as they lifted off from Sol Diablo.

“I know, sir,” Ray said quickly, and again he couldn’t quite get ahold of his voice, couldn’t make it work the way he wanted it to. “We stopped to replace the fuel we burned losing the tail.” It was true, but it wouldn’t make them two days later than anticipated - time enough to drop Gerard and Mikey somewhere remote. “And, like I said, we’re taking a longer route, keep us under the radar.” He sounded more sure now, more firmly rooted. “I hope that’s not too much trouble.”

Aaronson looked to the left where, Ray knew, he kept a display of clocks and calendars, organizing the businesses he had on various planets in the system. “Because we’ve worked together so long,” he said, sounding weary, “And because you’ve always come through before, I can make eight days work.” He paused again. “Longer than that, and you must understand my hands are tied. I won’t be able to pay you in full.” He gave Ray an earnest look.

“Yes, of course, I understand,” Ray said. He was starting to feel queasy. “Eight days.”

“Eight days,” Aaronson said. The video screen went abruptly dark.

Ray sagged into the captain’s chair. Eight days was cutting it as close as they possibly could, to set Gerard and Mikey down someplace and race back to the Lighthouse. And yet, what else could they do?

The bridge door hissed open behind him and he someone step carefully through.

“Ray?” It was Brian.

“How much did you hear?” he asked.

“Enough.” Brian moved to sit in the vacant navigator’s seat, and swiveled it to look at Ray. “I wanted to bust in when I realized what was going on but I thought, y’know… That might look.” He hesitated. “I knew you could handle it on your own.”

Ray nodded. “Right. I, uh. I mean, I handled it. I think?”

Brian leaned across to pat Ray on the shoulder. He could be so neurotic, he could be the biggest pain in the ass when things were going right, but the second things actually went to seed he was a beacon of calm. Like now. He smiled at Ray and squeezed his shoulder. “It’s a hiccup, Cap,” he said. “We’ve seen plenty worse.”

Ray turned to the nav controls so that Brian wouldn’t see him trying not to cry. He’d been up too long, that was all. They were far enough out into the black - he could set the navigation now and sleep for a spell.

-

The next morning, when Ray came in to offer Gerard something to eat, Gerard wouldn’t even look at him.

Ray set the plate down on the bedside table and raised his eyebrows. “We’re not interested in you or your brother dying on this ship. Be a lotta hassle for us, truth be told. You should just eat.”

Gerard glared at him. “Let me see Mikey.” 

He was persistent, that was for sure. “Man, you know I can’t do that. Put yourself in my position.” The silence between them tensed and coiled. “I mean, for what it’s worth, Mikey’s eating his meals and he’s come to no harm.” 

“Disloyal little brat,” Gerard said, but there was no malice behind it. If anything, he sounded fond. He lifted the plate to his face and sniffed. “You eat this?”

“Life outside the government payroll isn’t exactly the lap of luxury, but we make do,” Ray said evenly.

Gerard took a hesitant bite of the bread, chewed, swallowed, and then devoured the rest of it ravenously. Ray watched him eat, scooping the cubed protein up with his fingers, hunched around the plate like he was afraid Ray was going to take it away from him. For all Gerard might be acting, posturing to get some reaction, it occurred to Ray that his fear may be  _ genuine. _

When Gerard offered the plate back he looked sheepish, and Ray wanted to say something kind or find some way to convince him to accept what was going on, but he thought he probably couldn’t accomplish the latter without letting him in to see Mikey, and the former would come off insincere no matter what he said. “Thanks,” he said, instead. He took plate back from Gerard and held it in both hands.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Gerard asked. His voice was so small that Ray wasn’t sure, at first, that he’d really spoken.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said lamely. “We’re headed out to the rim, we’re gonna drop you someplace where you’ll be able to get to a town. We’re not gonna split you up, or anything.”

“Leave us on the rim?” Gerard stammered. His eyes were huge, his voice shrill and panicked. “That’s barbaric! We’ll die!”

Ray turned his eyes from Gerard to the empty plate in his hands. “You must not have grown up there.”

“Well.” Gerard swallowed. “No, not exactly.” His voice was tilled soil, planted with something Ray couldn’t root out. He looked at Gerard, trying to meet his eyes.

“What d’you mean?”

The ship hummed around them. Ray found himself picking at the tape holding the gauze over his neck. He lowered his hand and then leaned forward to place it just barely on the blade of Gerard’s forearm. Gerard stiffened, but didn’t move, and Ray withdrew his hand.

“We got files on you, on all of you, when we took your bounty,” Gerard said mechanically. His posture was military straight now. “I know you and your engineer are from Brunswick. I know your parents died in the marketplace air raid twenty-two years ago.” He looked up and fixed Ray with a gaze so intense he nearly flinched. When he spoke he did so deliberately. “That day made orphans of lots of children.”

It was like all the air had been sucked abruptly out of the room and replaced with something thicker, heavier, unbreathable. Ray fought the urge to double over, to sob for breath, to show how no matter how many mantras he had developed, how many corks holding fast in the dam of his emotions, even the mention of what happened still gutted him, twenty years on. He careened instead towards the meaning behind Gerard’s words and the significant look he was giving him.

“You and Mikey…” he said weakly.

Gerard nodded. “The accent’s mostly gone, now, but…”

Ray wanted to ask about the years that bridged the gap. What had taken them from the same roots to such disparate branches? Nobody on Brunswick was a government man by choice, but Ray remembered the hurt in Gerard’s eyes when the Dreadnaught hadn’t answered their hail. There was real loyalty there, and love, and even now in the way Gerard wasn’t saying anything else, Ray could see it. He looked sick to have opened his mouth at all.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “About your parents.”

“Me too. About yours, I mean.” Gerard pulled his knees up to his chest. “Well. And mine, too.”

Ray stood, unable to be in the room any longer, holding the plate in one hand and fiddling awkwardly with the gauze dressing on his neck with the other. “Do you… Do you need anything?” he asked. “A book?”

Gerard looked up at him. “You know you’re not very good at this whole hostage situation,” he said. He attempted a weak smile and Ray was at once disarmed by how lovely it was, and how sad.

Ray blinked. Something enormous had shifted between them. For the first time, Gerard was meeting his eyes. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to be good at it. I wouldn’t want the practice,” he said. “I’ll bring you some dinner later.”

Gerard didn’t respond, just collapsed back onto the bed so that Ray could open the door and let himself quietly into the hall. He bolted the door behind him and leaned against it. He’d be happy to see Gerard in his rearview.

-

Ray heard their voices before he saw them, and he slowed down - not to eavesdrop, of course not, but to give them privacy.

They were sitting together at the kitchen table. Ray could see them around the corner from the hallway to the bunks, and if either of them looked up they might be able to discern his dim shape amidst the shadows, but he didn’t think there was much risk of either of them spotting him.

Frank was leaning as far across the table as he could go, halfway out of his chair. It was a position that would seem forced, uncomfortable and unnatural on anybody else. Frank was always like that, though, twisting around, contorting himself in ways that would surely be painful when applied to a normal human body. That was the kind of energy he carried within himself, somehow. Lord knows where he got it.

Across from him, Bob. The yellow glow from the lamps on the walls traced a perimeter of dull gold around them, dark where they were connected, at the mouth. The awkward, wet sounds of them kissing. The rustle of Frank’s shirt and he shifted closer.

Ray had expected, to be honest, a lot more embarrassment on everyone’s part, having a couple aboard the ship. It had happened gradually, so slowly he hadn’t noticed it. When Frank had come to him to come clean, he’d nearly laughed.

“Bryar?” he’d said, and Frank had shrugged, and told him that he loved him. What a strange thing, to fall in love with somebody.

Frank sat back down across the table. His mouth was kissed red and smiling, and Bob was smiling, in his quiet way, under the thatch of his beard. Frank took Bob’s big, square hand in both of his own.

“Are you alright?” Bob asked, and Frank shrugged and leaned forward to kiss him again, and Bob stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “I know you, Frankie. I can tell.”

Frank shrugged again and turned his face to the side, so that the lamplight caught the edge of his jaw in a block of yellow, and his eyes fell into shadow. “You know,” he said. “I worry when he’s like this.”

“The captain?”

Frank looked at him like,  _ Who else?  _ Bob held his hand more firmly.

“It’s just… You know how he is. Once he convinces himself something’s the  _ right thing to do  _ there’s no persuading him.”

Bob voiced the question that had immediately come to Ray’s mind. “Persuade him to do what?”

Instead of answering, Frank scooted his chair over so that he was right next to Bob, so that he could lay his head on his shoulder, engulf himself in him. Bob wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

“We had this job, right? It’s a good job, it was gonna be simple. And he’s getting…” Frank groped for the words. “Invested, right? I’m just. I’m worried. Like if he doesn’t turn off the road he’s on now, he’s gonna get himself into some real trouble.”

“And that gets us in trouble.”

Frank turned his face up into the side of Bob’s neck and kept quiet.

“You know I’ll always protect you, right?” Bob asked. He tipped his face down to nudge a kiss against Frank’s brow.

Frank hummed. “I know you will.” He leaned up for a kiss, and Bob bent and obliged him, and they stayed like that for a long moment, entwined in one another. “I just wonder, who’s going to protect the captain?”

Watching them, Ray felt his heart stutter in his chest. It wasn’t that he was surprised, not exactly. But that Frank worried for him with the same depth of feeling, the same protectivity that he felt over everyone he brought aboard… And maybe that was the problem. Frank knew him so well, it was a function of growing up together, of being brothers, if not by blood then by circumstance. They had been children together, and then they had been adults, and nothing had changed, really.

It made him feel warm and guilty and sad all at once. If Frank could see the ways Gerard had already gotten under his skin, the strange similarities he saw between the two of them, and he was concerned, wasn’t that cause for worry of Ray’s own? Shouldn’t he trust someone who purportedly knew him better than he knew himself?

And yet. The thought of stopping his attempts at conversation with Gerard, especially now that he had established their shared history, was unpalatable. Every effort he’d made to divorce himself from the deaths of his parents was unraveling, and it felt as though Gerard was somehow connected. As though he could correct this injustice with Gerard’s help, could solve it for himself. For both of them. Ray had to know.

_ Once he convinces himself something’s the right thing to do… _

Well.

-

The next several days passed without major upset. Ray brought Gerard his meals and they talked, haltingly at first and then with genuine rhythm. Ray found himself able to talk about growing up on Brunswick - his adolescence spent playing big brother to Frank, then working with Frank’s father unloading cargo at the shipyards. The secret dream he’d held close of getting off-world, of seeing something of the rest of the planetary system.

“The first time I went up, it was in this absolute beater, more of a puddle-jumper,” he said, laughing. Remembering. “We went to trade on Kingston and when we got back I think…” Ray trailed off. He could still see perfectly, the way the surface of Brunswick had been a featureless coin of light in the ship’s window, and how that perspective - his planet small enough that he could almost reach out and cup it in the hollow of his palm - had never left him, after that. “I’m sure I was insufferable,” he finished, finally. “I think I felt very worldly.”

Gerard laughed.

“After we left Brunswick we didn’t come out of the sky for years,” he said hesitantly. Ray had to tease these details out of him like thread from cloth. “Just ships and stations and ships, and eventually some of the worlds in the core. I was probably eighteen by then.”

“Already on bounty?”

Gerard tipped his head to the side. “You won’t get those details out of me so easily, Captain,” he said. Ray hadn’t expected an answer, not really, but he had to press his luck sometimes.

“Can’t blame a fella for trying,” Ray said easily. “I’ve got to go captain the ship, but I brought you -” He retrieved from the pocket of his jacket a small paperback, one of Frank’s old sci-fi pulps. “Can’t vouch for its quality, but if you get desperate it might do for a laugh. I’ll come back later with dinner.”

Ray was at the door when Gerard spoke again.

“Captain, I was hoping to ask you something,” he said. Ray turned, and Gerard was turning the paperback over in his hands, looking at it, or through it. He seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. “I know you said you couldn’t let me see Mikey, and I understand why, but…” He set the book down beside himself on the bed. He wasn’t meeting Ray’s eyes - he had that same stiff, careful posture he’d adopted when he told Ray where he was from. “He’s my brother. And I know you understand what it’s like… To have a brother, and to want to look after him.”

Ray waited for Gerard to continue, and when he didn’t, he sighed.

“Gerard, it’s not just my decision.”

“You’re the captain!” Gerard did turn to face him then, dismayed. “I’d do anything, you could stop feeding me, you could put me to work, I’ll do whatever you want me to just -”

Ray held up a hand and Gerard fell reluctantly silent.

“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what I can do.”

Gerard deflated, turning back to the paperback but not picking it up. “If you’re not the one to ask, can you tell me who is?”

Ray shook his head. “This sort of decision, we make together,” he said. “I may be a captain but on this ship we’re a family, and I can’t… I couldn’t just tell them to put themselves in danger. We make that call together.” He paused. “No offense.”

Gerard shrugged, and slouched further into himself. “I guess I thought - I mean, it didn’t seem like the rest of them were keen to take us on in the first place, so.” He scrubbed his face with both hands. Ray noticed, not for the first time, how tired he looked. “I thought maybe that executive power was, you know. A captainly thing.”

“It didn’t exactly gain me any favors,” Ray said shortly. “That was the right thing to do. This… What you’re asking is more complicated.”

“Just think about it,” Gerard said hollowly. “Just let me believe you’re going to think about it?”

Ray set his hand back on the door handle. He studied the elegant lines of Gerard’s face and neck, the dark half-moons of exhaustion under his eyes. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, okay, I’ll think about it.”

-

The next morning over breakfast, and against his better judgment, Ray broached the subject with the more receptive members of the crew: Frank and James.

“I just think five minutes might not be as big a deal as we thought it would be,” Ray said. “Frank, you’ve been talking to Mikey, right? Do you think he’s a threat?”

Frank worried his bottom lip doubtfully between his teeth. “Cap, he did try to blow us out of the sky with a, you know, a laser cannon.”

Which was sort of an irrefutable point.

“If you think it’s the right thing to do, I’ll support you,” James said uncertainly. “I just… I mean, he shot you in the face, so.”

Ray’s hand went unconsciously to the bandage over his neck. He dropped it and looked between the two of them. Frank, his brother, who trusted his judgment implicitly, and James, who had always tried to approach problems from the most generous point of view he could. And neither of them were wholly on board. There was no way he could convince Bob and Brian, who were to a man more obstinate, more suspicious, who were still unhappy with having Gerard and Mikey aboard at all.

“Come to the med bay, Captain, let me take a look at your burn,” James said quietly, and Ray followed him, like he always did when he wasn’t sure what to do.

Back up on the examination table, Ray felt humbled, the way he always did. It was a clinical room, white and sterile and expressionless, but for the way James filled it up. James laid out gauze and tape and antiseptic on a tray and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow so that his silly tattoos showed, and put on a pair of gloves, which always seemed to be the action that transformed him from a man to a doctor.

“You shouldn’t be picking at it,” he observed as he peeled the gauze away from Ray’s neck and cheek. “If it itches, you should see me, I’ll give you something to numb the area.”

“Sorry,” Ray said. He tilted his head away so that James could swab the burn with some anti-inflammatory cream he swore would help.

“You get restless,” James said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“No, I mean, I’m  _ sorry,”  _ Ray said again. He couldn’t make himself elaborate on it, but the way James made an effort to trust him, and the way he was always gentle without being condescending, it sometimes made Ray feel so helpless.

James put his thumb against the center of the burn and pressed down. “Does that hurt?”

“It’s not that bad,” Ray told him.

“You’re gonna let that guy see his brother, right?” James asked. He wasn’t  _ not _ looking at Ray, but he had turned his attention to the overlap of the new burn and Ray’s old scar, and was smothering it in some kind of paste that smelled of oats and soap and felt miraculously cold.

Ray didn’t know what to say. He thought of Gerard’s pointed face in the lamplight, how hopeful he’d been, how desperate. He swallowed. “I want to,” he said, finally. “It seems like… the right thing to do.”

“Yeah, well,” James said. He peeled off one of his gloves and rubbed his hand over his mouth in thought.

“I wouldn’t put you in danger,” Ray said, and he knew it sounded defensive, and he knew it sounded too intimate. “Any of you. Crew comes first.”

“Captain, you already did,” James said gently.

“I’m not sorry for saving their lives -”

“And I don’t think you should be.” James took off his other glove and balled both of them up in his fist. “I just… It wouldn’t hurt you to admit this is reckless, would it?”

Ray slipped carefully off the table, out from under James’s hands, and left the cool sterility of the med bay behind him. There was a difference, he thought, between recklessness and trust.

-

He waited until the crew was asleep. In hindsight, it was a cowardly way to go about it, but he didn’t see any other way. He let himself into Gerard’s room to find him sitting up in bed, three quarters of the way through the novel he’d left him.

“God, I must be losing track of time in here,” Gerard said around a yawn. “I didn’t mean to stay up all night.”

“You’re not,” Ray said. It was absurd to be so nervous. “We’re going to see Mikey.”

Gerard deliberately folded over the page he was on and shut the book before setting it down. “Don’t say something you don’t mean, Captain,” he said.

“I’m serious, but it has to be now,” Ray told him. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, and held the door ajar for Gerard to follow.

Gerard paused on the threshold. He was like an animal that had been trained, that felt the presence of the leash around its neck so surely that even when it was freed it could go no further. He breathed in deep, shaky, and Ray put one hand on his elbow and the other on the small of his back and guided him out into the hallway.

“I don’t think I need to tell you that I’m armed, and that this is going to be quick,” Ray said. He unlocked the door to Mikey’s room. “But I’m sorry. You should know that. I wish… If I were only risking myself, it would be different.”

Gerard nodded, and stepped into Mikey’s bunk, and Ray followed and shut the door behind him.

It was so strange. They barely spoke - Gerard crawled into the bed beside Mikey and wrapped himself around him and they stayed like that, unmoving, for several minutes. Even in the dim lamplight Ray could see them both revitalize, seem to come alive in one another’s presence. He thought of the two years he’d spent shipping out on other people’s crews, leaving Frank behind on Brunswick for months at a time, and how it had only been when he’d come home that he felt entirely like himself again. He understood.

“Are you okay?” Gerard asked finally. “The captain says you’re eating, but I think he tells me what he knows I want to hear.”

“God, Gerard,” Mikey said, wriggling around to slug him on the shoulder. “I’m just bored more than anything. And I miss you.”

“Me too,” Gerard said. “Are they nice to you?”

Mikey turned onto his back and Gerard stretched all his limbs around him, slothlike. “Frank’s funny. We talk a bit. I don’t know anybody else.”

Gerard considered this for a long moment. “Okay,” he said at last, and gave Mikey what looked like an uncomfortably tight squeeze before standing up. “I’ll see you soon, okay? We’re gonna be okay.” It sounded to Ray like he was reassuring himself more than anything.

“I know, Gerard,” Mikey said. “I love you, okay?”

“Okay,” Gerard said again. “Yeah, Mikes, I love you, too.”

When they stepped back out into the hallway Ray studiously pretended not to see Gerard wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

“I meant it,” Ray said lamely, ushering Gerard back into his own bunk. “If I could give you more time I would.”

“No, I know,” Gerard said. “Believe me, you’ve done… I’m very grateful.” He was turning around, and then he was undoing the buttons of his shirt.

“Gerard,” Ray said mechanically. He was trapped, snagged on the small movements of Gerard’s hands. The canyon of pale, exposed skin between the open plackets of his shirt dove down to the waistband of his trousers. “Gerard,” Ray said again. “I think you have the wrong idea about me.”

“I don’t have anything else to pay you back with,” Gerard said. He untucked his shirt and shouldered it off. “You don’t have to be coy with me, Captain, I wasn’t always a bounty hunter.” He put his hand on Ray’s forearm, but kept his eyes lowered. “I know nothing comes without a price.”

In the half-light of the room’s dimmest lamp, Gerard was ethereal and lovely, something hewn from marble and weathered soft as butter. Ray shook his arm out of Gerard’s grasp. “Really,” he said, and he had no recourse for this situation, was so ill-prepared that all he could do was back up against the door, entirely disarmed. “I’m not being coy, Gerard, I can’t...”

Gerard stepped forward. The low light limned his eyelashes, outlined the damp gleam of his lips. He looked so beautiful, and Ray hesitated, caught on the shape of Gerard’s mouth. How soft it was, and how close. How deliberate Gerard was, taking Ray’s hand and squeezing it once before he reached for the buttons on Ray’s shirt. It was the first one slipping free that finally shocked Ray into action. He pushed Gerard’s hands away with maybe more force than he needed to. The slap it made cut the silence of the slumbering ship.  

“I’m serious, Gerard,” he said. “I brought you to see Mikey because it was right, not because I wanted… I mean, I  _ don’t  _ want this. You don’t have to pay me back, definitely not like this.”

The side of Gerard’s hand was stung pink where Ray had slapped it, and he looked at it silently for a moment before cupping his opposite palm over the spot. It may bruise. Ray felt inordinately guilty.

“Captain, I didn’t mean…” Gerard said slowly. “Thank you.”

Gerard backed away and picked his discarded shirt up off the floor. Ray watched him.

“You were… I thought you were on the government’s dime,” Ray said. Equal forces were warring within him, the half that desperately wanted not to have this conversation and the half that needed to know.

“There were a couple years, after I was grown when Mikey was still in school,” Gerard said. He was doing his buttons back up, hunching back in on himself. “I didn’t make a job of it, but I found out favors aren’t free.” He looked up at Ray, and then away. “Out here, you do what you have to if you want to take care of your own. Surely you know that, Captain.”

“I do, at that,” Ray said. He watched as Gerard sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the pulp novel, with its gaudy, alien-spangled cover, for something to do with his hands.

“It’s easy to be lonely out here, I think,” Gerard said, unprovoked. “I think that’s why it’s so… it comes natural, it’s what people want from me.” He paused. “I get lonely too, Captain.”

“There’s plenty of people in the black, Gerard,” Ray said. “Maybe you get lonely, but you’re never  _ alone.” _

“I don’t know if the distinction matters so much.” Gerard set the book aside. “You want somebody to feel close to for a little while, to feel… differently about, I guess. You want to feel like you’re alone  _ together.”  _ He studied Ray’s face. “Don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Ray answered. “In my estimation, it’s not worth the cost of letting someone else be in charge of you. But I won’t fault a man for living the best he can. I don’t…” He paused long enough to swallow the thick feeling in his throat that hobbled him whenever he thought of his family. “Listen, things would have gone very differently for me if nobody had taken me in after my parents died.”

Gerard nodded. “I expect so,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I think you’ve built a good life, Captain.”

It was unexpected, and quietly genuine. Ray sighed. He was suddenly and entirely exhausted. “Thank you, Gerard.” He stood, and left the room, and bolted it quietly behind him. He collapsed in his own empty bunk and felt, for reasons he refused to name, like weeping.

-

The next two days passed without incident. Ray brought Gerard his meals and they made polite small talk; he plotted routes between shipping channels to maximize their fuel supply; he and his crew bickered over what to do when they were finally rid of their cargo, human and otherwise.

As much as it pained him to admit, the place to go after they’d made both drops, Gerard and Mikey and the intel, was Brunswick. It was a place they’d be readily sheltered but that no one would think to look for them. Especially with Gerard and Mikey in the wind, probably - if Ray was honest with himself about their priorities - reporting them the second they got to a dedicated communications hub, all Gerard would be able to tell them was that Ray avoided Brunswick with everything in him, and that they were more likely to be on Humboldt, with Bob’s family, or Liberty, with James’s, or holed up back on Sol Diablo waiting for the dust to blow over.

“You sure?” Frank asked. “We’ve got other options. We’ve got that job on Archer.”

“It’ll keep,” Ray said. “I need us to keep our heads down, I want to be able to trust every single person who sees us. I don’t know what kinda storm’s waiting for us on the other side of this.”

Like all important crew conversations, this one was taking place around the kitchen table after dinner. Ray had opened a glass jar of gut-rot whiskey and passed it around as they talked, considered their options. He was warm and resigned to it and he wanted more than anything to be done talking about it.

“It’s a good plan,” Brian said. “It’ll put us out of harm’s way until our part of this story - whatever it is - doesn’t matter anymore. After that, the original plan still stands - we’ll get good work on Archer, and we can take it easy afterwards.”

“Looks like you’re gettin’ your trip home after all, eh Frankie?” James said, and Frank grinned and reached for the whiskey jar.

“I did seem to luck out, huh?” Frank took a generous swallow of the whiskey. “Besides, my folks still haven’t met the, y’know -” he gestured at Bob, who glared good-naturedly at him. “The love of my life. So I wanted to make the trip.”

Everyone groaned. And it made Ray glad, honestly, that they had to make the pilgrimage back home. It was good to be able to do this for Frank.

“That just leaves the matter of where we’re getting rid of our guests,” Brian said. He’d been thinking hard, and so had Ray, and between the two of them they hadn’t come up with any suitable solution.

“I actually might have a solution for you there,” James said. He held out his hand for the whiskey and Frank passed it to him. James took a long drink. He was already ruddy from liquor but the set of his mouth was serious. “We should take them to Liberty.”

James waited for someone to speak. At last it was Bob, probably the most sober of the lot of them, who said, “Aren’t we avoiding places we’re connected to?”

James drank again and handed the jar off to Ray before speaking. “My family’s all in the northwestern quadrant,” he explained. “In the southeast there’s… I don’t remember how many. Acres of salt flats, with a flat road running through to a good city where nobody knows me and I don’t know anybody.”

Ray was trying to follow his logic but the drink had made him slow, and he was tired besides. He waited patiently for James to come to his point; he always did.

“We fly them a few miles out into the salt flats. We give them supplies. We put them on the road back  to town. And then we’re close enough to the Lighthouse to make the rendezvous a couple of hours afterwards, when they’re still walking out.” He waited for a response. “So?”

Finally, Brian nodded. “It’s the best thing we’ve got. Thanks, doc.”

Ray drained the rest of the whiskey in one swallow and set the jar down on the scarred tabletop. “It’s a good plan,” he said. “Knew I paid you for something.”

James grinned at him. “When you  _ do  _ pay me,” he said, and swatted Ray’s hand on the table.

Suffused with the warmth of the whiskey, and the reassurance that they knew, for once, exactly what they were doing, Ray caught James’s hand in his and squeezed it, then let it go.

He could feel the cogs of their life settling back into their places. He could see on some distant horizon the return to business as usual, to being broke but happy, having each other, following the wind.

He thought about breaking the news to Gerard, and was at once so glad to be getting it over with and so unsure of how to deal with losing him, this tenuous thread to his life before his parents had died. He thought of the way Gerard had looked, half-dressed in the lamplight, and hated himself for it.

Telling Gerard could wait, he decided, until the next day.

**-**

Gerard looked up when Ray came in, and then let his head flop back down onto the bed when he saw that Ray wasn’t bringing him food. It was the next day, several hours after dinner. The last possible moment. They’d be touching down on Liberty in a matter of hours.

“A personal visit?” Gerard asked.

“Something like that,” Ray said. He felt, for reasons he didn’t quite want to put a finger on, nervous to tell Gerard they were almost to Liberty. He sat down in the chair and waited until Gerard had sat up and was giving him his full attention.

“Why the long face?” Gerard asked. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. He was so different, a week on, from the wreck Ray had liberated from the leaking corpse of the Séance.

Ray shook his head. “Nothing, don’t worry about it. I’ve got some news for you, though.”

Gerard cocked his head. “What’s up?”

“We’re a few hours outside of atmo at Liberty. We’ve got a spot picked out to set you down.” When Gerard didn’t answer he continued, rambling and nervous. “It’s not too far outside of a good town, you’ll be able to hail anybody you want from there. It’ll be safe.”

He wanted Gerard to say  _ something,  _ to be elated or to argue with him or to be disappointed, which was the obscure emotion curdling heavy in Ray’s own chest at the thought of leaving them to fend for themselves. Gerard just nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” Ray said back, for wont of anything better. He turned to go, and some strange force within himself stilled him in front of the door. “Look, Gerard -”

“It’ll be okay, Captain,” Gerard said. “You said so.”

“I just…” He turned and pressed his back to the door. Gerard was leveling a steady gaze at him, the kind of look that made him feel pinned in place.

“I hate leaving things unfinished,” Gerard said quietly. He studied his hands. “It shouldn’t be so hard for us to admit there’s something here,” he continued. “I’d be kidding myself if I pretended I didn’t feel it.”

Ray sighed. It felt good, better, to have it spoken aloud. “I feel like shit for it,” he said. “With the, y’know, the circumstances.”

Gerard shrugged. “You shouldn’t. The other night, you were very restrained.”

“I wanted to kiss you,” Ray said, and even that sounded stupid in his light voice. That was the nature of loneliness, maybe, the craving less to hold someone down, to get off, than to  _ hold, _ and to feel  _ known. _

“Do you still want to?” Gerard asked, and he stood, tentatively. They hadn’t touched each other outside of that night, hadn’t even allowed themselves to be close enough. Gerard stepped into arm’s reach and waited there.

“I can’t,” Ray said. His fingers fluttered helplessly at his sides, fighting the temptation to take Gerard’s face in his hands. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Ray,” Gerard said. He shuffled a little bit closer. He had never called Ray by his first name before, and Ray savored the sound. “In a few hours we’re never going to see each other again. I don’t want to leave it like this.”

It was hardly conscious when they kissed, not a decision as much as… they had to. Ray put both hands on the sides of Gerard’s jaw and kissed him, and opened his mouth against him because already it wasn’t enough.

They tumbled back onto the bed. Ray would examine this memory later, in still frames: the huffing sound Gerard made into his mouth when they hit the mattress; the coral-colored flush that crept up from the collar of Gerard’s shirt as Ray kissed his neck, removed his shirt, kissed his shoulder; the way the still fluorescent light outlined them both in a white halo, and how Gerard looked so delicate in his arms; how quiet it was when they were done.

Ray looked at his watch. He had stayed too long, too late, and Frank, left to man the helm, would be suspicious. He didn’t want to leave the bittersweet afterglow of the bed and Gerard warm against him.

“You should go,” Gerard said not unkindly. “I don’t want you to, but you should.”

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. He pushed his mouth against Gerard’s hair. His feelings for Gerard, whatever words might be applied to them, were as broad as the vacuum through which their ship propelled itself, and he was on the outside without a spacesuit. “I wish there was more time.”

Gerard turned around in Ray’s arms and pressed his face against Ray’s chest. “Nothing perfect lasts forever,” he said softly. “If we meet again, I’ll have to kill you. Or Mikey will.”

“We won’t,” Ray said. He sighed. “If we do, you won’t be the only ones with a grudge to settle.”

Gerard laughed. It reverberated oddly in the hollow space between them. “I wish I could bottle this moment and keep it forever.”

Ray held him a little closer.

-

That was the thing, Ray guessed, about takeoffs and landings. They were all manner of symbolic. He shifted in the pilot’s chair. The warm afterglow of whatever he’d had, however briefly, with Gerard had faded and left him feeling chilly and guilty. He bore the ship through atmo with a steady hand and watched the rust-brown plains of Liberty spread out below the ship.

Every planet on the rim looked the same unless you were from there. Liberty rippled with fields of wheat and corn. As they drew closer to the ground the shadow cast from the ship crumpled, fitting itself against rolling hills and valleys, snapping into place over farmhouses, and then sliding away, smooth. James stepped through the doorway and onto the bridge behind him and cleared his throat.

“Can I speak to you, Captain?” he asked.

Ray nodded, and James moved to sit delicately in the usually-vacant navigator’s seat.

“Sorry we can’t make more of a stop,” Ray said. He meant it, too: when they made it out to Liberty they tried to make a point to check in on James’s family, who were hospitable almost to a fault. From the first, they’d treated Ray and his crew as their own, and always thanked him for keeping their son safe, no matter how much Ray insisted it was the other way around.

James shrugged. “Can’t work out every time, I know that,” he said. “We’ll make it out this way again, I expect.” He made no effort to disguise the wistfulness in his voice. James was wistful by default. There was within him, Ray knew, a well of nostalgia so deep that he would speak fondly of an enemy given the chance and an hour’s distance. They were very different, the two of them, and very similar in the same measure.

Ray knew James would circle around to his point eventually. He steered the ship further afield, cutting around a small town and heading out towards the salt fields that frosted Liberty’s southern hemisphere.

“I don’t mean to speak out of turn,” James said finally.

Ray looked at him. He hoped - and as much as he tried to maintain composure, to have a handle on his crew and to lead them as well as they deserved - that James considered him more than a captain. He valued James’s opinion. He should make that known. “James,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” James interrupted. “I just. I hope you know what you’re doing. Sir.”

Ray turned his face very quickly away. They both stared out at the curve of the planet, at the distant lip of where the wheat fields gave way to the salt flats and their strange, opalescent shine. In the midday sun the glare reflected back towards the ship, bright like the pinpoint of a distant star. When Ray blinked the shape impressed itself on the back of his eyelids in a hot, maroon sunburst.

“I think I do,” he said finally. He didn’t want to meet James’s eyes; he didn’t want James to see the uncertainty he’d surely find in Ray’s face. “And I mean… It won’t matter pretty soon.”

James spread his palms down on the navigator’s control panel. He drummed his fingers. “I hope you don’t think me…” he started. “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I do worry about you, Captain.”

“You don’t have to call me Captain.”

“Don’t I?”

He saw the rustle of movement in his peripheral vision that told him James had turned to look at him, and he could imagine perfectly the skeptical squint on his face, the way his brow furrowed in two dark creases over his nose.

“James, you’re my friend,” he said. It was hardly adequate.

James sighed. “I hope so,” he said. “You know  _ he’s _ not, though. Right? They aren’t.”

He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation, however vaguely they were talking around it. “I know.”

“And it’s none of my business, but it’s not exactly great for crew morale when you take on hostages we don’t want, people we can barely afford to feed, who were trying to kill us less than an hour before they came aboard, and then you -” James cut himself off. His hands hand twitched against the controls and he clenched them into fists. “I know you have a lot of empathy, Captain. I suspect it’s the reason you’ve kept me around this long.”

And there it was, or, more to the point, there it wasn’t.

“You’re right,” Ray said. “It’s not any of your business.” He adjusted the controls as they descended from upper atmo and felt the familiar bump as their gravity regulators brushed shoulders with the natural gravity of the planet. “Best secure the med bay. We’ll be landing soon.”

Ray didn’t watch James stand up and move to the door, but he could sense his hesitation, his desire to linger. That was the problem, he supposed, with knowing somebody very well. Eventually he heard the slight shuffle that meant James had stepped into the corridor, and the swish and thud of the door sliding shut behind him.

Out in front of the window, the salt flats grew wider and more dazzling. Ray followed the trajectory of a service road carved through the center of the flats, flattened like a grey-brown ribbon against the pearly earth. The ship dove towards it, its cast shadow growing bigger and bigger until it resolved from a dark smudge to to the shape of the vessel, fully formed.

Ray took the brake controls in hand, and guided the Jet Star down to settle her feet on the salt flats of Liberty.

-

Gerard and Mikey stood huddled together in the center of the cargo bay. The crew had assembled in some strange approximation of an honor guard to see them on their way. James handed Mikey a canvas bag and moved away from him quickly.

“There’s water in there, and some sandwiches,” he said. “You’re not too far out from Saint Charles, but just in case.”

Mikey looked into the bag and nodded at James in thanks.

When the airlock doors slid to the sides and the bay door began to lower, the light that poured into the cargo hold was almost blinding. Ray watched the empty desert outside, and tried to picture Mikey and Gerard walking through the salt flats alone. It was so flat and so broad, its vastness so complete, that the idea of any living, moving thing on its crystalline surface seemed at once bizarre and oddly satisfying. That this migration of two from Ray’s ship to the town might forever alter the landscape, might imprint in the salt fields two sets of permanent footprints, was somehow filled with symbolism. Even his spaceship made her presence known, her hulking black body a blot against the everything white.

Ray moved towards the open doors and waited for Gerard and Mikey to come forward. This was an inevitability, of course, and he shouldn’t have felt as melancholy about it as he did. Gerard stepped past him and then stopped, turned back.

“Ray,” he said, and Ray tried to pour some reassurance and some measure of the unshakable disappointment he felt into the look he gave back.

“You’re going to be okay,” Ray said, for lack of anything better to say.

“I’m sorry,” Gerard said.

Mikey gave them both an impatient glare.

Then the world exploded.

-

Ray opened his eyes to chaos. Something huge and dangerous had hit the side of the Jet Star at a force which sent it skidding across the salt flats. His crew had been tossed against the cargo bay’s far wall. Ray was laying half in and half out of the open airlock, Gerard and Mikey heaped beside him.

“What the fuck was that?” Frank yelled. He was trying to pry himself from underneath a pile of toppled empty crates. Beside him, Bob got unsteadily to his feet and started to help him free himself.

“Don’t know,” Ray said. “Gerard, Mikey, get back in here.” He dragged himself upright using the threshold of the airlock, and looked around when he was standing, only to find Gerard and Mikey looking at him, standing on the open cargo bay door.

“I’m serious, we’re getting out of here, we’ll drop you someplace else,” Ray insisted, starting forward to take Gerard’s hand.

Gerard stepped out of his reach. The look he was giving Ray was so strange, so unhappy.

“Gerard, please,” Ray said. He made to reach for Gerard, and as he stepped forward out of the air lock’s outer door he heard a loud crack and felt a blinding, staggering pain bloom across the back of his head. He crumpled to the ground.

For a long, dark moment he couldn’t see. He heard the sound of boots on either side of his head, felt the cool steel of the airlock door against his cheek and the hot pressure where the burn on his jaw was holding the weight of the rest of his face. There was yelling from above and behind him, and the crackling static of a handheld radio, and all he could think was, abstractly:  _ Gerard. _

It was harder, this time, to stand. When Ray pulled himself to his feet he had to slump over against the airlock wall for a long moment. The floor spun crazily in front of his downcast eyes. When he looked up, he blinked several times, trying to stabilize the tableau in front of him. But when it resolved into blurred stillness, it didn’t make any more sense.

Gerard and Mikey were standing in the middle of the cargo hold. Gerard had the floor’s grate open and was standing above it, peering in while a dozen armored militia men stood around, guns trained on the rest of Ray’s crew.

Presently, another man in the dark grey uniform of a United Militia corporal climbed up out of the crawlspace. In one hand he held the padded case which housed Aaronson’s disc. In the other, he was clutching what was unmistakably the round clip that held Ray’s keys. He handed the keys to Gerard, who held them for a moment, looking down at them, before dropping them unceremoniously on the cargo bay floor.

The corporal bent his head to speak to Gerard. There had to be some mistake. Gerard turned and spoke quietly, beckoned Mikey closer. They conversed. It was as though… Ray knew what this meant but he couldn’t make sense of it. The corporal slipped the case into the pocket of his coat.

Ray put his hand up to the back of his head and it came away damp, his fingertips stained red with his own blood. “Gerard,” he mumbled. Gerard either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care.

One of the soldiers, a hulking beast of a man with a laser pistol trained on Brian, pivoted so he could speak to the corporal. “You want we should dispatch them now?”

The corporal shrugged and looked at Gerard and Mikey, as if deferring to their judgment.

“Don’t waste your ammunition,” Gerard said.

The soldiers began, slowly, to move away from Ray’s captive crew, towards the airlock doors where he was still listing like an unmoored boat in high tide.

“Gerard,” he said again, and again Gerard ignored him.

Soldiers shuffled past, keeping the sights of their guns well aimed into the chests of his crew, his family. Frank was crying. James, who was closest to him, reached to touch his shoulder, to comfort him, and one of the soldiers barked “Don’t move!” He put his hand down.

Ray stood aside to let the soldiers past. Unarmed as he was, what could he do? Gerard and Mikey followed, shoulder to shoulder. There was very little in Gerard’s face that was at all reminiscent of the way he’d been, only hours before, tame and unguarded in Ray’s arms.

“Gerard,” he croaked, and there was no way Gerard hadn’t heard him, he was right here. Ray grabbed his wrist and held it, half expecting his hand to pass right through, for this to be a dream.

Instead, Gerard gave him a look so cold he felt nearly burned by it. He jerked his hand away, and he moved so quickly, Ray didn’t have time to prepare himself. Gerard snatched the pistol out of one of the soldiers’ hands, aimed it impeccably into Ray’s chest, and fired.

This was another moment he would remember only in isolated details, like the faces of an exquisite miniature, something he could turn over and over in his hands, that would still fill him with awe. The cold grate of the cargo bay floor, and how the ridges of iron pressed a crosshatch into his face, his bare arm. The way the soldiers’ boots sounded, thick and amplified now. From where he had crumpled to the floor, he could just see the backs of the retreating soldiers. They were skewed in an odd perspective, impossibly large, at once very close and very far away. It made his head spin.

Just before the threshold of the airlock, Gerard had turned, pistol still in hand. Ray thought for a panicked moment that Gerard was not content with the job he’d done, that he was coming back to put a bullet between his eyes, to drain the life out of him. He didn’t, though: he just looked back at Ray, at the heap of him, the blood seeping through his shirt, his heavy, flickering eyelids. He found Ray’s eyes and gave him a look he couldn’t parse, and handed the pistol back to the guard from whom he’d wrested it.

Behind him, he could hear Frank crying harder, and James yelling, and Brian yelling louder, and he could imagine the hunch of Bob’s shoulders when faced with a situation he could not control. Mikey pounded the button that controlled the airlock doors with the side of his fist as they went by, and slowly the doors slid shut behind them. All the brilliant, white light of the desert that had poured in and dazzled them receded to a square, then a strip, then a bright afterimage in Ray’s closed eyes.

“Captain!” James said. “Ray!”

Hands on him. Motion. The wet, unpleasant feeling of his bloody clothes sticking to his skin. And then there was nothing, no light, no feeling. Just the faint echo of James repeating his name, and the sense of unease Gerard’s face had instilled in him, and then those faded as well and there was nothing at all.

_To be continued..._


End file.
